The Dream of the Celt

VIII

When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger arrived in Iquitos after a little more than six weeks of an exhausting voyage that transported him and the members of the commission from England to the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, the old infection that irritated his eyes had become worse, as had the attacks of arthritis and the general state of his health. But, faithful to his Stoic character (Herbert Ward called him “Senecan”), at no moment during the journey did he allow his ailments to be evident, making an effort instead to raise the spirits of his companions and help them endure their suffering. Colonel R. H. Bertie, a victim of dysentery, had to return to England when the ship docked at Madeira. The one who held up best was Louis Barnes, familiar with African agriculture since he had lived in Mozambique. The botanist Walter Folk, an expert in rubber, suffered in the heat and had neuralgia. Seymour Bell feared dehydration and always had a bottle of water in his hand, sipping from it constantly. Henry Fielgald had been in Amazonia the previous year, sent by Julio C. Arana’s company, and gave advice on how to protect against mosquitoes and the “evil temptations” of Iquitos.

There were certainly a good number of those. It seemed incredible in a city so small and unattractive—an immense muddy district with crude constructions of wood and adobe topped with palm leaves, a few buildings of noble materials with galvanized metal roofs, spacious mansions whose facades were decorated with tiles imported from Portugal—that there should be so great a proliferation of bars, taverns, brothels, and gambling houses, and that prostitutes of all races and colors should be on display so shamelessly from the earliest hours of the day on the high sidewalks. The countryside was superb. Iquitos was on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon, the Nanay River, surrounded by luxuriant vegetation, very tall trees, a permanent murmur from the groves, and river water that changed color as the sun moved across the sky. But few streets had sidewalks or asphalt, ditches ran beside them carrying excrement and garbage, there was a stench that at nightfall thickened to the point of nausea, and music from the bars, brothels, and centers of diversion never stopped, playing twenty-four hours a day. Stirs, the British consul, who welcomed them at the docks, indicated that Roger would stay in his house. The company had prepared a residence for the members of the commission. That same night, the prefect of Iquitos, Señor Rey Lama, gave a dinner in their honor.

It was a little after midday and Roger, saying that instead of having lunch he preferred to rest, withdrew to his bedroom. A simple room had been prepared for him that had indigenous fabrics with geometric drawings hanging on the walls and a small terrace from which a stretch of the river was visible. The street noise diminished here. He lay down without even removing his jacket or shoes and fell asleep immediately. He was filled with a peaceful feeling he hadn’t experienced for the month and a half of his journey.

He dreamed not of the four years of consular service he had just completed in Brazil—in Santos, Pará, and Rio de Janeiro—but the year and a half he had spent in Ireland between 1904 and 1905 following the months of heightened excitement and a demented rush of activity while the British government prepared the publication of his Report on the Congo, and the scandal that would make of him a hero and a pariah as praise from the liberal press and humanitarian organizations and diatribes from Leopold II’s hacks rained down on him at the same time. To escape the publicity while the Foreign Office decided his new assignment—after the Report it was unthinkable that he would set foot again in the Congo—Roger left for Ireland in search of anonymity. He did not pass unnoticed, but he was free of the invasive curiosity that in London left him no private life. Those months meant the rediscovery of his country, his immersion in an Ireland he had known about only in conversations, fantasies, and readings, very different from the one where he had lived as a child with his parents, or as an adolescent with his great-aunt and great-uncle and the rest of his paternal family, an Ireland that was not the tail and shadow of the British Empire, that fought to recover its language, traditions, and customs. “Roger, dear: you’ve become an Irish patriot,” his cousin Gee joked in a letter. “I’m making up for lost time,” he replied.

During those months he had made a long trek through Donegal and Galway, taking the pulse of the geography of his captive homeland, observing like a lover the austerity of her deserted fields and wild coast, chatting with her fishermen, fatalistic, unyielding men, independent of time, and her frugal, laconic farmers. He had met many Irish people “from the other side,” Catholics and some Protestants who, like Douglas Hyde, founder of the National Literary Society, promoted the renaissance of Irish culture, wanted to restore native names to towns and villages, resuscitate the ancient songs of Ireland, the old dances, and the traditional spinning and needlework of tweed and linen. When his appointment to the consulate in Lisbon was announced, he delayed his departure repeatedly, inventing pretexts regarding his health, in order to attend the first Feis na nGleann (Festival of the Glens) in Antrim, attended by close to three thousand people. During those days Roger felt his eyes grow wet when he heard the joyous melodies played by bagpipers and sung in chorus, or listened—not understanding what they were saying—to the storytellers recounting in Gaelic the ballads and legends submerged in the medieval night. Even a hurling match, that centuries-old sport, was held at the festival, where Roger met nationalist politicians and writers such as Sir Horace Plunkett, John Bulmer Hobson, and Stephen Gwynn, and was reunited with the women friends who, like Alice Stopford Green, had made the struggle for Irish culture their own: Ada McNeill, Margaret Dobbs, Alice Milligan, Agnes O’Farrelly, and Rose Maud Young.

From then on he dedicated part of his savings and income to the associations and schools of the Pearse brothers, which taught Gaelic, and the nationalist journals to which he contributed under a pseudonym. In 1905, when Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin, Roger communicated with him, offered to collaborate, and subscribed to all his publications. This journalist’s ideas coincided with those of Bulmer Hobson, with whom Roger had become friends. It was necessary to create, along with colonial institutions, an Irish infrastructure (schools, businesses, banks, industries) that gradually would replace the one imposed by Britain. In this way the Irish would become conscious of their own destiny. It was necessary to boycott British products, refuse to pay taxes, replace British sports such as cricket and soccer with national sports, and literature and the theater as well. In this way, peacefully, Ireland would break free of colonial subjugation.

In addition to reading a great deal about the Irish past, under Alice’s tutelage, Roger tried again to study Gaelic and hired a teacher, but made little progress. In 1906 the new foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey of the Liberal Party, offered to send him as consul to Santos, in Brazil. Roger accepted, not because he wanted the job, but because his pro-Irish patronage had used up his small patrimony, he existed on loans, and he needed to earn a living.

Perhaps the scant enthusiasm with which he returned to his diplomatic career contributed to making his four years in Brazil—1906 to 1910—a frustrating experience. He never really became accustomed to that vast country in spite of its natural beauty and the good friends he acquired in Santos, Pará, and Rio de Janeiro. What depressed him most was that, unlike the Congo, where, in spite of the difficulties, he always had the impression he was working for something transcendent that went far beyond the consular framework, in Santos his principal activity had to do with drunken British sailors who got into fights and whom he had to get out of jail, then pay their fines and return them to Britain. In Pará he heard for the first time about violence in the rubber regions. But the Foreign Office ordered him to concentrate on the inspection of port and commercial activity. His work consisted of recording the movement of ships and facilitating matters for the British who arrived intending to buy and sell. His worst time was in Rio de Janeiro, in 1909. The climate made all his ailments worse and added to them allergies that kept him from sleeping. He had to live fifty miles from the capital, in Petrópolis, situated in highlands where the heat and humidity were lower and the nights were cool. But daily travel by train to his office turned into a nightmare.

In his sleep he recalled insistently that in September 1906, before leaving for Santos, he wrote a long epic poem, “The Dream of the Celt,” about the mythic past of Ireland, and a political pamphlet, with Alice Stopford Green and Bulmer Hobson, The Irish and the English Army, objecting to the recruitment of Irishmen into the British armed forces.

Biting mosquitoes woke him, taking him from a pleasurable siesta and submerging him in the Amazonian twilight. The sky had turned into a rainbow. He felt better: his eye burned less and the arthritic pain had eased. Showering in Stirs’s house turned out to be a complicated operation: the pipe holding the showerhead came out of a receptacle into which a servant poured buckets of water while Roger soaped and rinsed. The lukewarm temperature of the water made him think of the Congo. When he went down to the first floor, the consul was waiting for him at the door, ready to take him to the house of Prefect Rey Lama.

They had to walk several blocks in wind that obliged Roger to keep his eyes half-closed. In the semidarkness they stumbled over holes, rocks, and garbage in the street. The noise had increased. Each time they passed the door of a bar the music swelled and they could hear toasts, fights, and the shouts of drunks. Stirs, advanced in years, a widower with no children, had spent half a decade in Iquitos and seemed a weary man without illusions.

“What’s the attitude in the city toward the commission?” Roger asked.

“Frankly hostile,” the consul replied immediately. “I suppose you already know that half of Iquitos lives off Señor Arana. I mean, off the enterprises of Señor Arana. People suspect the commission intends harm to the person who gives them work and food.”

“Can we expect any help from the authorities?”

“Just the opposite: all the obstacles in the world, Mr. Casement. The authorities in Iquitos also depend on Señor Arana. The prefect, the judges, and the military haven’t received their salaries from the government for months. Without Señor Arana they would have starved to death. Bear in mind that Lima is farther from Iquitos than New York and London because of the lack of transportation. In the best of circumstances it’s two months of travel.”

“This is going to be more complicated than I imagined,” remarked Roger.

“You and the gentlemen of the commission must be very prudent,” the consul added, hesitating now and lowering his voice. “Not here in Iquitos. There, in Putumayo. Anything can happen in those remote places. It’s a savage world, without law or order. No more and no less than the Congo, I suppose.”

The Prefecture of Iquitos was on the Plaza de Armas, a large space without trees or flowers, where, the consul pointed out, indicating a curious iron structure that looked like a partially completed Meccano, an Eiffel house (“Yes, the same Eiffel as the tower in Paris”) was being assembled. A prosperous rubber-grower had bought it in Europe, brought it back to Iquitos in pieces, and now was reassembling it to be the best social club in the city.

The Prefecture occupied almost half a block. It was a large, faded one-story house, lacking grace or form, with spacious rooms and barred windows, and divided into two wings, one used for offices and the other for the prefect’s residence. Señor Rey Lama, a tall, gray-haired man whose large mustache was waxed at the ends, wore boots, riding pants, a shirt buttoned to the neck, and a strange bolero jacket with embroidered decorations. He spoke some English and gave Roger an excessively cordial welcome full of bombastic rhetoric. The members of the commission were all there, packed into their evening clothes, perspiring. The prefect introduced Roger to the other guests: magistrates from the Superior Court; Colonel Arnáez, commander of the garrison; Father Urrutia, father superior of the Augustinians; Señor Pablo Zumaeta, general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company; and four or five other people: merchants, the head of the customs office, the editor of El Oriental. There was not a single woman in the group. He heard champagne being uncorked. They were offered glasses of a white sparkling wine that, though lukewarm, seemed of good quality, undoubtedly French.

The supper had been prepared in a large courtyard lit by oil lamps. Countless indigenous servant girls, barefoot and wearing aprons, served hors d’oeuvres and brought in platters of food. It was a mild night, and stars twinkled in the sky. Roger was surprised at how easily he understood Loretan speech, a somewhat syncopated and musical Spanish in which he recognized Brazilian expressions. He felt relieved: he’d be able to understand a good deal of what he heard on the journey and this, even though they’d have an interpreter, would support the investigation. Around him at the table, where they had just been served a greasy turtle soup he swallowed with difficulty, several conversations were being held at the same time, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with interpreters who interrupted them, creating parentheses of silence. Suddenly the prefect, sitting across from Roger and his eyes already alight with glasses of wine and beer, clapped his hands. Everyone stopped talking. He offered a toast to the new arrivals. He wished them a pleasant stay, a successful mission, and hoped they would enjoy Amazonian hospitality. “Loretan and especially Iquitian,” he added.

As soon as he sat down, he spoke to Roger in a voice loud enough to stop the other conversations and start another one, with the participation of the twenty or so guests.

“If you’ll permit me a question, my esteemed Consul? What exactly is the purpose of your trip and this commission? What have you come here to find out? Don’t take this as impertinent. On the contrary. My desire, and the desire of all the authorities, is to assist you. But we have to know why the British Crown has sent you. A great honor for Amazonia, of course, and we would like to prove ourselves worthy.”

Roger had understood almost everything Rey Lama said, but he waited patiently for the interpreter to translate his words into English.

“As you no doubt know, in England, in Europe, there have been denunciations of atrocities committed against the indigenous people,” he explained calmly. “Torture, murder, very serious accusations. The principal rubber company in the region, the one that belongs to Señor Julio C. Arana, the Peruvian Amazon Company, is, and I assume this is well known, a British company, registered on the London stock market. The government and public opinion would not tolerate a British company violating human and divine laws in this way in Great Britain. The reason for our journey is to investigate the truth of those accusations. Señor Arana’s company has sent the commission. His Majesty’s Government has sent me.”

An icy silence fell over the courtyard when Roger opened his mouth. The noise from the street seemed to diminish. There was a curious immobility, as if all those gentlemen who a moment earlier had been drinking, eating, conversing, moving, gesturing, had become victims of a sudden paralysis. All eyes were on Roger. A climate of distrust and disapproval had replaced the cordial atmosphere.

“The company of Julio C. Arana is prepared to cooperate in defense of its good name,” Señor Pablo Zumaeta said, almost shouting. “We have nothing to hide. The ship that will take you to Putumayo is the best in our firm. There you will have every opportunity to confirm with your own eyes the vileness of these slanders.”

“We are grateful, señor,” Roger agreed.

And at that very moment, with an excitement unusual in him, he decided to subject his hosts to a test that, he was sure, would unleash reactions which would be instructive for him and the members of the commission. In the casual voice he would have used to speak of tennis or the rain, he asked:

“By the way, señores. Do you know whether the journalist Benjamín Saldaña Roca, I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly, happens to be in Iquitos? Would it be possible to speak to him?”

His question had the effect of a bomb. The diners exchanged looks of shock and anger. A long silence followed his words, as if no one dared touch so thorny a subject.

“But is it possible!” the prefect exclaimed at last, theatrically exaggerating his surprise. “The name of that blackmailer has reached even London?”

“That’s true, señor,” Roger agreed. “The denunciations of Señor Saldaña Roca and of the engineer Walter Hardenburg made the scandal concerning the Putumayo rubber plantations explode in London. No one has answered my question: Is Señor Saldaña Roca in Iquitos? Might I see him?”

There was another long silence. The discomfort of the guests was manifest. Finally the father superior of the Augustinians spoke.

“No one knows where he is, Señor Casement,” said Father Urrutia in a very pure Spanish clearly different from that of the Loretans. Roger had more difficulty understanding him. “He disappeared from Iquitos some time ago. People say he’s in Lima.”

“If he hadn’t fled, we Iquitians would have lynched him,” declared an old man, shaking a choleric fist.

“Iquitos is the land of patriots,” exclaimed Pablo Zumaeta. “No one forgives that individual who invented despicable stories to slander Peru and bring down the enterprise that has brought progress to Amazonia.”

“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: the 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.

They were sitting on the small terrace off Roger’s bedroom, and on the table, in front of the bench they shared, was a pitcher with papaya juice and two glasses. Eponim Thomas Campbell had been hired seven years earlier in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, with eighteen other Barbadians, by Lizardo Arana, the brother of Don Julio César, to work as an overseer at one of the stations in Putumayo. And right there the deception began because, when they hired him, they never told him he would have to spend a good part of his time on correrías.

“Explain to me what correrías are,” said Roger.

Going out to hunt Indians in their villages to make them come to harvest rubber on the company’s lands. Whoever they were: Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, or Boras. Any of the Indians in the region. Because all of them, without exception, were unwilling to collect jebe. They had to be forced. Correrías required very long expeditions, sometimes with no result. They would arrive and find the villages deserted. The inhabitants had fled. Other times not, happily. They would attack, shooting to frighten them and keep them from defending themselves, but they did, with their blowguns and garrotes. There would be a battle. Then the ones who could walk, men and women, had to be driven back, tied together by the neck. The old people and newborns were left behind so they wouldn’t hold up the march. Eponim never committed the gratuitous cruelties of Armando Normand in spite of having worked for him for two years in Matanzas, where Mr. Normand was the manager.

“Gratuitous cruelties?” Roger interrupted. “Give me some examples.”

Eponim shifted on the bench, uncomfortable. His large eyes rolled in their sockets.

“Mr. Normand had his eccentricities,” he murmured, looking away. “When someone behaved badly. That is, when he didn’t behave the way he expected. He would drown the man’s children in the river, for example. Himself. With his own hands, I mean.”

He paused and explained that Mr. Normand’s eccentricities made him nervous. You could expect anything at all from so strange a man, even that one day he’d feel like emptying his revolver into the person closest to him. That’s why Eponim asked to transfer to another station. When they sent him to Último Retiro, whose chief was Mr. Alfredo Montt, Eponim slept easier.

“Did you ever have to kill Indians in the course of your duties?”

Roger saw that the Barbadian’s eyes looked at him, moved away, then looked at him again.

“It was part of the job,” he admitted, shrugging. “For the overseers and the ‘boys,’ who were also called ‘rationals.’ In Putumayo a lot of blood flows. People end up getting used to it. Life there is killing and dying.”

“Would you tell me how many people you had to kill, Mr. Campbell?”

“I never kept count,” Eponim quickly replied. “I did the job I had to do and tried to turn the page. I did what I had to. That’s why I say the company treated me very badly.”

He became entangled in a long, confused monologue against his former employers. They accused him of being involved in the sale of some fifty Huitotos to a plantation that belonged to Colombians, the Señores Iriarte, with whom the company of Señor Arana was always fighting for laborers. It was a lie. Eponim swore and swore again he had nothing to do with the disappearance of those Huitotos from Último Retiro, who, it was learned later, reappeared working for the Colombians. The one who had sold them was the station chief himself, Alfredo Montt. A greedy man and a miser. To hide his guilt he denounced Eponim and Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. Pure slander. The company believed him and the three overseers had to flee. They suffered terrible hardships to reach Iquitos. The company chiefs in Putumayo had ordered the “rationals,” those men receiving company rations, to kill the three Barbadians on sight. Now Eponim and his two companions lived by begging and doing occasional odd jobs. The company refused to pay their return passage to Barbados. It had denounced them for abandoning their work, and the judge in Iquitos ruled in favor of Casa Arana, of course.

Roger promised that the government would take care of repatriating him and his two colleagues, since they were British citizens.

Exhausted, he went to lie down as soon as he had said goodbye to Eponim Thomas Campbell. He was perspiring, his body ached, and he felt a traveling indisposition that was tormenting him little by little, organ by organ, from his head to his feet. The Congo. Amazonia. Was there no limit to the suffering of human beings? The world was infested with these enclaves of savagery that awaited him in Putumayo. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Could the hydra be defeated? Its head was cut off in one place and reappeared in another, bloodier and more horrifying. He fell asleep.

He dreamed about his mother at a lake in Wales. A faint, distant sun shone through the leaves of the tall oaks, and agitated, feeling palpitations, he saw the muscular young man he had photographed this morning on the embankment in Iquitos. What was he doing at that Welsh lake? Or was it an Irish lake in Ulster? The slender silhouette of Anne Jephson disappeared. His uneasiness was due not to the sadness and pity caused in him by an enslaved humanity in Putumayo, but the sensation that although he didn’t see her, Anne Jephson was nearby, spying on him from a circular grove of trees. Fear, however, did not weaken his growing excitement while he watched the boy from Iquitos approach. His torso dripped water as he emerged from the lake like a lacustrian god. At each step his muscles stood out, and on his face was an insolent smile that made Roger shudder and moan in his sleep. When he awoke, he confirmed with disgust that he had ejaculated. He washed and changed his trousers and underwear. He felt ashamed and uncertain.

He found the members of the commission overwhelmed by the testimonies they had just received from the Barbadians Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. The ex-overseers had been as raw in their statements as Eponim had been with Roger. What horrified them most was that Dayton as well as Sinbad seemed obsessed above all with disproving they had “sold” those fifty Huitotos to the Colombian plantation owners.

“They weren’t in the least concerned with the floggings, mutilations, or murders,” Walter Folk kept repeating, a man who did not seem to suspect the evil that greed could provoke. “Such horrors seem the most natural thing in the world to them.”

“I couldn’t bear Sinbad’s entire statement,” Henry Fielgald confessed. “I had to go out to vomit.”

“You’ve read the documentation collected by the Foreign Office,” Roger reminded them. “Did you think the accusations of Saldaña Roca and Hardenburg were pure fantasies?”

“Not fantasies,” replied Walter Folk, “but certainly exaggerations.”

“After this aperitif, I wonder what we’re going to find in Putumayo,” said Louis Barnes.

“They’ll have taken precautions,” suggested the botanist. “They’ll show us a very cosmetic reality.”

The consul interrupted to announce that lunch was served. Except for Stirs, who with appetite ate sábalo fish served with a salad of chonta fruit and wrapped in corn husks, the commissioners barely tasted a mouthful. They were silent, absorbed in their memories of the recent interviews.

“This journey will be a descent into hell,” prophesied Seymour Bell, who had just rejoined the group. He turned to Roger. “You’ve already gone through this. One survives, then.”

“The wounds take time to close,” Roger suggested.

“It’s not so serious, gentlemen.” Stirs tried to raise their spirits; he had eaten in very good humor. “A good Loretan siesta and you’ll feel better. With the authorities and the heads of the Peruvian Amazon Company, things will go better for you than with the blacks, you’ll see.”

Instead of taking a siesta, Roger sat at the small night table in his room and wrote in his notebook everything he remembered of his conversation with Eponim Thomas Campbell and made summaries of the testimonies the commission members had taken from the other two Barbadians. Then, on a separate paper, he wrote down the questions he would ask that afternoon of the prefect, Rey Lama, and the manager of the company, Pablo Zumaeta, who, Stirs had told him, was Julio C. Arana’s brother-in-law.

The prefect received the commission in his office and offered them glasses of beer, fruit juices, and cups of coffee. He’d had chairs brought in and distributed straw fans for ventilation. He still wore the riding trousers and boots he’d had on the night before, but had changed his embroidered vest for a white linen jacket and a shirt closed to the neck, like a Russian tunic. He had a distinguished air with his snowy temples and elegant manners. He let them know he was a career diplomat. He had served in Europe for several years and accepted this prefecture at the behest of the president of the republic—he indicated the photograph on the wall of a small, elegant man, dressed in tails and a top hat, with a sash across his chest—Augusto B. Leguía.

“Who sends through me his most cordial greetings,” he added.

“How good that you speak English and we can do without the interpreter, Prefect,” responded Roger.

“My English is very bad,” Rey Lama interrupted affectedly. “You’ll have to be indulgent.”

“The British government regrets that its requests that President Leguía’s government initiate an investigation into the accusations in Putumayo have been useless.”

“There is a judicial action in progress, Señor Casement,” the prefect interrupted. “My government did not need His Majesty to initiate it. That is why it has appointed a special judge who is on his way now to Iquitos. A distinguished magistrate: Judge Carlos A. Valcárcel. You know that the distance between Lima and Iquitos is enormous.”

“But in that case, why send a judge from Lima?” Louis Barnes intervened. “Aren’t there judges in Iquitos? Yesterday, at the dinner you held for us, you introduced several magistrates.”

Roger noted that Rey Lama gave Barnes a pitying look, the kind appropriate for a child who has not reached the age of reason, or an imbecilic adult.

“This talk is confidential, isn’t it, gentlemen?” he asked at last.

Every head nodded. The prefect still hesitated before answering.

“My government sending a judge from Lima to investigate demonstrates its good faith,” he explained. “The easiest thing would have been to ask a local judge to do it. But then …”

He stopped, uncomfortable.

“A word to the wise,” he added.

“Do you mean that no judge from Iquitos would dare confront the company of Señor Arana?” Roger asked quietly.

“This is not cultured, prosperous England, gentlemen,” the prefect murmured sorrowfully. He had a glass of water in his hand and he drank it all in one swallow. “If a person takes months to come here from Lima, the remuneration for magistrates, authorities, the military, and functionaries takes even longer. Or, quite simply, it never arrives at all. And what can these people live on while they wait for their salaries?”

“The generosity of the Peruvian Amazon Company?” suggested Walter Folk.

“Don’t put words I haven’t said in my mouth,” Rey Lama balked, raising his hand. “Señor Arana’s company advances their salaries to functionaries as a loan. These sums are to be paid back, in principle, with minimal interest. They are not a gift. There is no bribery. It is an honorable agreement with the state. But even so, it’s natural that magistrates who live thanks to those loans are not absolutely impartial when dealing with Señor Arana’s company. You understand, don’t you? The government has sent a judge from Lima to carry out an absolutely independent investigation. Isn’t this the best proof that it is determined to find out the truth?”

The commission members drank from their glasses of water or beer, confused and demoralized. How many are already looking for a pretext to return to Europe? Roger thought. They certainly hadn’t foreseen any of this. With the exception perhaps of Louis Barnes, who had lived in Africa, the others did not imagine that in the rest of the world not everything functioned the way it did in the British Empire.

“Are there authorities in the region whom we’ll visit?” asked Roger.

“Except for inspectors who pass through when a bishop dies, none,” said Rey Lama. “It is a very isolated region. Until a few years ago, virgin forest, populated only by savage tribes. What authority could the government send there? And to what end? For the cannibals to eat? If there’s commercial life there now, and work, and a beginning of modernity, it is due to Julio C. Arana and his brothers. You should consider that as well. They have been the first to conquer that Peruvian land for Peru. Without the company, all of Putumayo would already have been occupied by Colombia, which hungers for the region. You cannot leave out that aspect, gentlemen. Putumayo is not England. It is an isolated and remote world of pagans who, when they have twins or children with a physical deformity, drown them in the river. Julio C. Arana has been a pioneer, he has brought in boats, medicines, Catholicism, clothes, Spanish. Abuses must be punished, naturally. But don’t forget, we’re dealing with a land that awakens greed. Don’t you find it strange that in the accusations of Señor Hardenburg, all the Peruvian plantation owners are monsters while the Colombians are archangels filled with compassion for the natives? I’ve read the articles in the journal Truth. Didn’t you find that odd? Sheer coincidence that the Colombians, bent on taking over that land, have found a defender like Señor Hardenburg, who saw only violence and abuses among the Peruvians but not a single comparable case among the Colombians. Before he came to Peru he worked on the railroads in Cauca, remember. Couldn’t we be dealing with an agent?”

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.”

He sighed again and breathed with difficulty.

“Can’t you do anything with the authorities?”

“We could, in principle,” said Father Urrutia. “Slavery was abolished in Peru more than half a century ago. We could have recourse to the police and the judges. But all of them also have bought their little servants. Besides, what would the authorities do with the girls they rescued? Keep them or sell them, of course. And not always to families. Sometimes to brothels for what you can imagine.”

“Is there no way to return them to their tribes?”

“The tribes around here are almost nonexistent by now. The parents were abducted and driven to the rubber plantations. There’s no place to take them. Why rescue those poor creatures, and for what? In these circumstances, perhaps it’s a lesser evil for them to stay in families. Some people treat them well, are fond of them. Does that seem monstrous to you?”

“Monstrous,” Roger repeated.

“It does to me, to us, as well,” said Father Urrutia. “We spend hours at the mission, racking our brains. What’s the solution? We can’t find it. We’ve taken steps in Rome to see if nuns can come and open a small school here for the girls. At least they’d receive some instruction. But will the families agree to send them to school? Very few, in any case. They consider them animals.”

He sighed again. He had spoken with so much bitterness that Roger, infected by the priest’s dejection, wanted to return to the British consul’s house. He stood.

“You can do something, Señor Casement,” said Father Urrutia in farewell, shaking his hand. “What’s happened is a kind of miracle. I mean, the denunciations, the scandal in Europe. The coming of this commission to Loreto. If anyone can help these poor people, it is all of you. I’ll pray for you to come back from Putumayo safe and sound.”

Roger walked back very slowly, not looking at what was going on in the bars and brothels where he could hear voices, singing, strumming guitars. He thought about those children torn away from their tribes, separated from their families, packed into the bilge of a launch, brought to Iquitos, sold for twenty or thirty soles to a family where they would spend their lives sweeping, scrubbing, cooking, cleaning toilets, washing dirty clothes, insulted, hit, and at times raped by their owner or the sons of the owner. The same old story. The never-ending story.

IX

When the cell door opened and he saw in the doorway the bulky shape of the sheriff, Roger thought he had a visitor—Gee or Alice, perhaps—but the jailer, instead of indicating that he should get to his feet and follow him to the visitors’ room, stood looking at him in a strange way, not saying anything. They turned down the petition, Roger thought. He remained lying on his cot, certain that if he stood the trembling in his legs would make him collapse.

“You still want a shower?” the cold, slow voice of the sheriff asked.

My last wish, he thought. After the wash, the hangman.

“This goes against the rules,” the sheriff murmured with some emotion. “But today’s the first anniversary of the death of my son in France. I want to offer an act of compassion to his memory.”

“I thank you,” said Roger, standing. What had gotten into the sheriff? When had he ever shown him any kindnesses?

It seemed as if the blood in his veins, frozen when he saw the jailer appear at the door of his cell, began to circulate through his body again. He went out to the long, soot-stained hall and followed the fat jailer to the bathroom, a dark area that had a row of chipped toilets along one wall, a line of showers along the opposite wall, and some unpainted concrete receptacles with rusted spouts that poured out the water. The sheriff remained standing at the entrance while Roger undressed, hung his blue uniform and convict’s cap on a nail in the wall, and went into the shower. The stream of water made him shiver from head to toe and, at the same time, produced a feeling of joy and gratitude. He closed his eyes, and, before soaping himself with the cake he had taken from one of the rubber boxes hanging on the wall, rubbed his arms and legs, feeling the cold water slide along his body. He was happy and exalted. With the stream of water not only did the dirt that had accumulated on his body for so many days disappear, but preoccupations, distress, and remorse as well. He soaped and rinsed himself for a long while until the sheriff indicated from a distance, with a clap of his hands, that he should hurry. Roger dried with the same clothing he put on. He did not have a comb and smoothed his hair with his hands.

“You have no idea how grateful I am for this wash, Sheriff,” he said as they returned to his cell. “It has given me back life and health.”

The jailer replied with an unintelligible murmur.

When he lay down on his cot again, Roger attempted to go back to reading Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, but he couldn’t concentrate and put the book back on the floor.

He thought about Captain Robert Monteith, his assistant and friend for the last six months he spent in Germany. A magnificent man! Loyal, efficient, and heroic. His companion in travel and travails on the U-19 German submarine that brought them, along with Sergeant Daniel Julian Bailey, alias Julian Beverly, to the coast of Kerry, where the three almost drowned because they didn’t know how to row. Didn’t know how to row! That’s how things were: foolish little things could become mixed with great events and wreck them. He recalled the gray, rainy dawn, rough sea, and heavy mist on Good Friday, April 21, 1916, and the three of them in the unsteady boat with three oars where the German submarine had left them before disappearing into the fog. “Good luck,” Captain Raimund Weisbach shouted by way of farewell. Again he had the awful feeling of impotence, trying to control the boat pitching in the violent waves, and the inability of three makeshift rowers to head it toward the coast whose location none of them knew. The boat spun around, went up and down, leaped, traced circles with a variable radius, and since none of the three managed to maneuver past them, the waves, striking the sides of the boat, made it shudder so much they thought that at any moment it might capsize. And in fact, it did capsize. For a few minutes the three men were on the point of drowning. They splashed and swallowed salt water until they succeeded in righting the boat and, helping one another, climbed back in. Roger recalled the valiant Monteith, his hand infected by the accident he’d had in Germany, in the port of Heligoland, trying to learn to drive a motor launch. They moored there to change submarines because the U-2, on which they sailed from Wilhelmshaven, had a flaw. The wound had tormented him during the entire week’s voyage between Heligoland and Tralee Bay. Roger, who made the crossing suffering atrocious seasickness and vomiting, hardly eating or getting off his narrow bunk, recalled Monteith’s stoic patience as his wound swelled. The anti-inflammatories the German sailors on the U-19 gave him did no good. His hand continued suppurating and Captain Weisbach, commander of the U-19, predicted that if it wasn’t taken care of as soon as they landed, the wound would develop gangrene.

The last time he saw Captain Robert Monteith was in the ruins of McKenna’s Fort at dawn on April 21, when his two companions decided Roger should remain hidden there while they went to ask the Tralee Volunteers for help. They decided this because he was the one who ran the greatest risk of being recognized by the soldiers—the most sought-after prize for the watchdogs of the Empire—and because he could not endure any more. Sick and weakened, he had fallen down twice, exhausted, and the second time was unconscious for several minutes. After shaking his hand, his friends left him in the ruins of Fort McKenna with a revolver and a small bag of clothes. Roger recalled how, when he saw the larks flying around him and heard their song and discovered he was surrounded by wild violets growing out of the sandy ground of Tralee Bay, he thought, I have reached Ireland at last. His eyes filled with tears. Captain Monteith, when he left, had given him a military salute. Small, strong, agile, untiring, an Irish patriot to the marrow of his bones. Roger didn’t hear a single complaint from him or detect the slightest symptom of weakness in him during the six months they had lived together in Germany, in spite of the failures he’d had in Limburg Camp because of the resistance—when it wasn’t open hostility—of the prisoners to enrolling in the Irish Brigade Roger wanted to form to fight alongside Germany (“but not under their command”) for the independence of Ireland.

Monteith was soaked from head to foot, his swollen, bleeding hand badly wrapped in a rag that was coming loose, and with an expression of great fatigue. Walking with energetic strides in the direction of Tralee, he and Sergeant Bailey, who was limping, were lost in the fog. Had Robert Monteith arrived without being captured by the officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary? Had he managed to make contact in Tralee with people from the IRB (the Irish Republican Brotherhood) or the Volunteers? He never learned how and where Bailey was captured. His name was never mentioned in the long interrogations to which Roger was subjected, first in the Admiralty by the heads of the British intelligence services, and then by Scotland Yard. The sudden appearance of Daniel Bailey as a witness for the public prosecutor at his trial for treason dismayed Roger. In his statement, filled with lies, Monteith was not named once. Was he still free or had they killed him? Roger prayed the captain was safe and sound now, hiding in some corner of Ireland. Or had he taken part in the Easter Rising and perished there like so many anonymous Irish fighting in an adventure as heroic as it was rash? This was most likely. That he had been in the Dublin Post Office, firing, beside Tom Clarke whom he so admired, until an enemy bullet put an end to his exemplary life.

His had been a rash adventure as well. Believing that by coming to Ireland from Germany he would be able, by himself, using pragmatic and rational arguments, to stop the Rising planned so secretly by the Military Council of the Irish Volunteers—Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and one more—that not even the president of the Irish Volunteers, Professor Eoin MacNeill, had been informed. Wasn’t it another delirious fantasy? Reason doesn’t convince mystics or martyrs, he thought. In the bosom of the Irish Volunteers, Roger had been a participant in and witness to long, intense arguments regarding his thesis that the only way an armed action by the Irish nationalists against the British Empire would succeed was if it coincided with a German military offensive that would keep the bulk of British military power immobilized. He and young Plunkett had spent many hours in Berlin arguing about this without coming to an agreement. Was it because the heads of the Military Council never shared his conviction that the IRB and the Volunteers who prepared the insurrection hid their plans from him until the last moment? When, at last, the information reached him in Berlin, Roger already knew that the German admiralty had rejected a naval offensive against Britain. When the Germans agreed to send arms to the insurrectionists, he insisted on going in person to Ireland, accompanying the weapons, secretly intending to persuade the leaders that an uprising at this time would be a useless sacrifice. He had not been wrong about that. According to all the news he had been able to gather here and there since the days of his trial, the Rising was a heroic gesture, but it cost the lives of the most intrepid leaders of the IRB and the Volunteers and the imprisonment of hundreds of revolutionaries. The repression now would be interminable. The independence of Ireland had taken yet another step backward.

He had a bitter taste in his mouth. Another serious mistake: having put too much hope in Germany. He recalled his argument with Herbert Ward in Paris, the last time he saw him. His best friend in Africa from the time they met, both young and eager for adventures, he mistrusted all nationalisms. He was one of the few educated, sensitive Europeans on African soil, and Roger learned a great deal from him. They exchanged books, commented on their readings, talked and argued about music, painting, poetry, and politics. Herbert dreamed of being an artist exclusively some day and stole all the time he could from his job and dedicated it to sculpting human African types in wood and clay. Both had been harsh critics of the abuses and crimes of colonialism, and when Roger became a public figure and the target of attacks for his Report on the Congo, Herbert and Sarita, his wife, living in Paris where he had become an acclaimed sculptor who, for the most part, made castings in bronze, inspired by Africa, were his most enthusiastic defenders. And they were as well when his Report on Putumayo, denouncing the crimes committed by the rubber barons in Putumayo against the indigenous people, provoked another scandal around the figure of Roger Casement. Herbert had even shown sympathy at first for Roger’s nationalist conversion, though often in letters he joked about the dangers of “patriotic fanaticism” and reminded him of Dr. Johnson’s phrase, according to which “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Their rapport came to an end on the subject of Germany. Herbert always energetically rejected the positive, beautified vision Roger had of Chancellor Bismarck, unifier of the German states, and of the “Prussian spirit,” which he thought rigid, authoritarian, coarse, hostile to imagination and sensitivity, and more akin to barracks and military hierarchies than to democracy and the arts. When, in the middle of the war, he learned from denunciations in the British newspapers that Roger had gone to Berlin to conspire with the enemy, he had a letter sent to him, through his sister Nina, putting an end to their friendship of so many years. In the same letter he let him know that his and Sarita’s eldest son, a boy of nineteen, had just died at the front.

How many other friends had he lost, people like Herbert and Sarita Ward, who had appreciated and admired him and now considered him a traitor? Even Alice Stopford Green, his teacher and friend, had objected to his trip to Berlin although, after he was captured, she never mentioned their disagreement again. How many others were repelled by him because of the vile things the British press attributed to him? A stomach cramp obliged him to curl up on his cot. He remained like that for a long time until the sensation of a stone in his belly crushing his intestines had passed.

During the eighteen months in Germany he often had wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. But no, facts had confirmed all his theses when the German government made public a statement—written for the most part by him—declaring solidarity with the idea of Irish sovereignty and a desire to help the Irish recover the independence seized by the British Empire. But later, after long waits on Unter den Linden to be received by the authorities in Berlin, broken promises, his ailments, and his failures with the Irish Brigade, he had begun to doubt.

He felt his heart pounding, as it did each time he recalled those icy days of whirling snow storms when at last, after so many negotiations, he finally could speak to the 2,200 Irish prisoners in the Limburg camp. He explained, carefully repeating a speech he had rehearsed in his mind over months, that this wasn’t a question of “going over to the enemy camp” or anything like that. The Irish Brigade would not be part of the German army. It would be an independent military force with its own officers and would fight for the independence of Ireland from its colonizer and oppressor “alongside, but not inside” the German armed forces. What hurt him most, an acid that corroded his spirit unendingly, was not that of 2,200 prisoners only some 50 had joined the Brigade. It was the hostility his proposal encountered, the shouts and muttering when he clearly heard the words traitor, yellow, sold, cockroach, used by many prisoners to show him their contempt, and finally, the spittle and attempts at aggression directed at him the third time he tried to speak to them (tried, because he could say only a phrase or two before he was silenced by whistles and insults). And the humiliation he felt when he was rescued from a possible attack, perhaps a lynching, by his escort of German soldiers, who ran out of the camp with him.

He had been deluded and naïve to think the Irish prisoners would enlist in a brigade equipped, dressed—though the uniform had been designed by Roger—fed, and advised by the German army they had just fought, which had gassed them in the Belgian trenches, killed, maimed, and wounded so many of their companions, and had them now behind barbed wire. One had to understand the circumstances, be flexible, remember what the Irish prisoners had suffered and lost, and not feel rancor toward them. But that brutal collision with a reality he had not expected was very difficult for Roger. It had repercussions in his body as well as his spirit, for having lost almost all hope, he was struck down with the fevers that kept him in bed for so long.

During those months, the solicitous loyalty and affection of Captain Robert Monteith were a balm without which he probably would not have survived. The difficulties and frustrations found everywhere had no effect—not, at least, a visible one—on his conviction that the Irish Brigade conceived of by Roger would eventually become a reality and recruit into its ranks the majority of Irish prisoners, and Captain Monteith devoted himself enthusiastically to directing the training of the fifty volunteers to whom the German government had granted a small camp in Zossen, near Berlin. He even succeeded in recruiting a few more. All of them wore the Brigade uniform designed by Roger, including Monteith. They lived in field tents, had marches, maneuvers, and firing practice with rifles and pistols, but with blank bullets. Discipline was strict, and in addition to exercises, military drills, and sports, Monteith insisted that Roger continually give talks to members of the Brigade on the history of Ireland, its culture, its singularity, and the opportunities that would open for Ireland once its independence had been achieved.

What would Captain Robert Monteith have said if he had seen that handful of Irishmen from Limburg camp—freed thanks to an exchange of prisoners—file in as prosecution witnesses at the trial, among them Sergeant Daniel Bailey. Responding to questions from the public prosecutor, all of them swore that Roger Casement, surrounded by officers of the German army, had exhorted them to go over to the enemy ranks, dangling as bait the prospect of freedom, a salary, and future earnings. And all of them had corroborated the flagrant lie that the Irish prisoners who gave in to his hounding and joined the Brigade immediately received better rations, more blankets, and a more flexible regime of furloughs. Captain Robert Monteith wouldn’t have become indignant with them. He would have said, once again, that those compatriots were blind or, rather, blinded by the poor education, ignorance, and confusion in which the Empire kept Ireland, placing a veil over their eyes regarding their true situation as a people occupied and oppressed for the past three centuries. One mustn’t despair, all of that was changing. And perhaps, as he did so often in Limburg and Berlin, he would tell Roger, to raise his spirits, how enthusiastically and generously young Irishmen—farmers, laborers, fishermen, artisans, students—had entered the ranks of the Irish Volunteers since the organization was founded at a great meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin on November 25, 1913, as a response to the militarization of unionists in Ulster, led by Sir Edward Carson, who openly threatened to disobey the law if the British parliament approved Home Rule. Captain Robert Monteith, a former officer in the British Army who had fought in the Boer War in South Africa and been wounded in two battles, was one of the first to enlist in the Volunteers. He was put in charge of the military training of recruits. Roger, who attended that emotional meeting in the Rotunda and was one of the treasurers of funds for the purchase of weapons, elected to that position of extreme confidence by the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, did not recall having known Monteith then. But Monteith assured him he had shaken his hand and told him he was proud it was an Irishman who denounced to the entire world the crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of the Congo and Amazonia.

He recalled the long walks he took with Monteith around Limburg Camp or along the streets of Berlin, at times in the pale, cold dawn, at times at dusk in the first shadows of the night, speaking obsessively about Ireland. In spite of the friendship that grew between them, he never succeeded in having Monteith treat him with the informality that exists between friends. The captain always addressed him as his political and military superior, granting him the right of way on paths, opening doors, placing chairs close to him, and saluting him before or after shaking his hand, clicking his heels, and bringing his hand martially up to his kepi.

Captain Monteith heard for the first time about the Irish Brigade Roger was attempting to form in Germany from Tom Clarke, the reserved leader of the IRB and the Irish Volunteers, and immediately offered to go and work with him. Monteith had been confined at the time in Limerick by the British army as punishment after it was discovered that he was giving clandestine military instruction to the Volunteers. Tom Clarke consulted with the other leaders and his proposal was accepted. His journey, which Monteith recounted to Roger in full detail as soon as they saw each other in Germany, had as many mishaps as an adventure novel. Accompanied by his wife in order to disguise the political content of his trip, Monteith left Liverpool for New York in September 1915. There the Irish nationalist leaders placed him in the hands of the Norwegian Eivind Adler Christensen (when he thought of it, Roger felt his stomach turn) who, in the port of Hoboken, secretly brought him aboard a ship that would soon leave for Christiania, the capital of Norway. Monteith’s wife remained in New York. Christensen had him travel as a stowaway, frequently changing berths and spending long hours hidden in the bilge, where the Norwegian brought him water and food. The ship was stopped by the Royal Navy in mid-crossing. A squad of British sailors boarded and examined the documentation of crew and passengers, searching for spies. For the five days it took the sailors to search the ship, Monteith jumped from one hiding place to another—at times as uncomfortable as squatting in a closet under piles of clothing and other times sunk in a barrel of tar—without being discovered. At last he disembarked secretly in Christiania. His crossing of the Swedish and Danish borders to enter Germany was no less novelesque and obliged him to use various disguises, one of them as a woman. When he finally reached Berlin, he discovered that the leader he had come to serve, Roger Casement, was ill in Bavaria. Not wasting a moment, he immediately took the train and when he arrived at the Bavarian hotel where Roger was convalescing, he clicked his heels, touched his head, and introduced himself with the words: “This is the happiest moment of my life, Sir Roger.”

The only time Roger recalled having disagreed with Captain Robert Monteith was one afternoon, in the military camp at Zossen, after he had given a talk to the members of the Irish Brigade. They were having tea in the canteen when Roger, for some reason he didn’t remember, mentioned Eivind Adler Christensen. The captain’s face transformed into a grimace of disgust.

“I see you don’t have a good memory of Christensen,” he said jokingly. “Are you angry with him for having you travel as a stowaway from New York to Norway?”

Monteith did not smile. He had become very serious.

“No, sir,” he muttered. “That’s not why.”

“Why, then?”

Monteith hesitated, uncomfortable.

“Because I’ve always believed he is a spy for British intelligence.”

Roger recalled that those words had the effect on him of a punch in the stomach.

“Do you have any proof of such a thing?”

“None, sir. Just a hunch.”

Roger reprimanded him and ordered him not to make such conjectures without proof. The captain stammered an apology. Now Roger would have given anything to see Monteith if only for a few moments to beg his pardon for having reproved him. “You were absolutely right, my good friend. Your intuition was correct. Eivind is something worse than a spy: he’s a real demon. And I’m a naïve imbecile for having believed in him.”

Eivind, another of the great mistakes in this final stage of his life. Anyone who wasn’t the “overgrown boy” that he was, as he had been told by Alice Stopford Green and Herbert Ward, would have detected something suspicious in the way that incarnation of Lucifer had entered his life. Not Roger. He had believed in the accidental meeting, in a connivance of fate.

It happened in July 1914, the same day he arrived in New York to promote the Irish Volunteers among the Irish communities in the United States, obtain support and weapons, and meet with the veteran fighters John Devoy and Joseph McGarrity, the nationalist leaders of the North American branch of the IRB, called Clan na Gael. He had gone out to walk around Manhattan, fleeing the humid, steaming little hotel room burning in the New York summer, when he was approached by a blond young man as handsome as a Viking god, whose amiability, charm, and confidence seduced him immediately. Eivind was tall, athletic, with a feline walk, deep blue eyes, and a smile between archangelic and raffish. He didn’t have a cent and let him know it with a comic grimace, showing him the inside of his empty pockets. Roger invited him to have a beer and something to eat. And he believed everything Christensen told him: he was twenty-four and had run away from his home in Norway when he was twelve. He had managed to travel as a stowaway to Glasgow. Since then he had worked as a stoker on Scandinavian and British ships on all the seas of the world. Now, stranded in New York, he barely managed to scrape by.

And Roger had believed him! On his narrow cot he pulled in his legs, in pain with another of those stomach cramps that took his breath away. They attacked in moments of great nervous tension. He controlled his desire to cry. Each time he felt sorry for and ashamed of himself to the point where his eyes filled with tears, he felt depressed and repelled afterward. He had never been a sentimental man given to displaying his feelings, he had always known how to hide behind a mask of perfect serenity the upheavals that shook his emotions. But his character had changed since he arrived in Berlin, accompanied by Eivind Adler Christensen, on the last day of October 1914. Had his being sick, broken, and with his nerves frayed contributed to the change? During his final months in Germany especially, when in spite of the injections of enthusiasm with which Captain Robert Monteith wanted to inoculate him, he realized his project for the Irish Brigade had failed, began to feel that the German government distrusted him (perhaps thinking he was a British spy), and learned that his denunciation of the supposed plot of the British consul in Norway, Findlay, to kill him did not have the international repercussions he had expected. The final blow was discovering that his comrades in the IRB and the Irish Volunteers in Ireland hid from him until the last moment their plans for the Easter Rising. (“They had to take precautions, for reasons of security,” Robert Monteith reassured him.) Furthermore, they insisted that he remain in Germany and forbade him to join them. (“Think of your health, sir,” Monteith offered as an excuse.) No, they weren’t thinking of his health. They, too, were distrustful because they knew he opposed an armed action if it did not coincide with a German military offensive. He and Monteith took the German submarine, contravening the orders of the nationalist leaders.

But of all his failures, the greatest had been to trust so blindly and stupidly in Eivind/Lucifer, who accompanied him to Philadelphia to visit Joseph McGarrity and was with him in New York, at the meeting organized by John Quinn, where Roger spoke before an audience filled with members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and at the parade of more than a thousand Irish Volunteers in Philadelphia, on August 2, whom Roger addressed to thundering applause.

From the very beginning he noticed the distrust Christensen provoked in the nationalist leaders in the United States. But he was so vigorous in assuring them they should trust Eivind’s discretion and loyalty as they did his own that the IRB and its American branch, Clan na Gael, eventually accepted the Norwegian’s presence at all Roger’s public activities in the United States and agreed to his traveling as Roger’s aide to Berlin.

The extraordinary thing was that not even the strange episode in Christiania made Roger suspicious. On the day they had arrived in the Norwegian capital on their way to Germany, Eivind, who had gone out alone to take a walk, was—according to his account—accosted by strangers, abducted, and taken by force to the British consulate at 79 Drammensveien. There he was interrogated by the consul himself, Mr. Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, who offered him money to reveal his companion’s identity and intentions in coming to Norway. Eivind swore to Roger he hadn’t revealed anything, and they let him go after he promised the consul to find out what they wanted to know concerning that gentleman about whom he was totally ignorant, and whom he accompanied only as a guide in a city—a country—he was unfamiliar with.

And Roger had swallowed that fantastic lie without thinking for a second he was the victim of a trap! He had fallen into it like a stupid child!

Was Eivind Adler Christensen working then for the British services? Captain Reginald Hall, head of British Naval Intelligence, and Basil Thomson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, his interrogators since he was brought to London under arrest—he’d had very long and cordial exchanges with them—gave him contradictory information about the Scandinavian. But Roger had no illusions. Now he was certain it was absolutely false that Eivind had been abducted on the streets of Christiania and taken by force to the consul with the grandiose last name: Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay. The interrogators showed him, no doubt to demoralize him—he had confirmed what fine psychologists they both were—the report of the British consul in the Norwegian capital to his superior in the Foreign Office regarding the inopportune arrival at the consulate at 79 Drammensveien of Eivind Adler Christensen, demanding to speak with the consul in person. And how he revealed, when the diplomat agreed to receive him, that he was accompanying an Irish nationalist leader traveling to Germany with a false passport and the assumed name of James Landy. He asked for money in exchange for this information and the consul gave him twenty-five kroner. Eivind offered to continue giving him private, secret material about the incognito individual as long as the British government compensated him generously.

Moreover, Hall and Thomson let Roger know that all his movements in Germany—talks with high functionaries, military men, and government ministers in the Ministry of Foreign Relations on Wilhelmstrasse as well as his encounters with Irish prisoners in Limburg—had been recorded with great precision by British intelligence. So that Eivind, as he pretended to plot with Roger, preparing a trap for Consul Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, continued communicating to the British government everything Roger said, did, wrote, and whom he received and whom he visited during his German stay. I’ve been an imbecile and deserve my fate, he repeated to himself for the thousandth time.

At this point the cell door opened. They were bringing him lunch. Was it midday already? He had been lost in memories as the morning passed without being aware of it. How wonderful it would be if every day were like this. He barely tasted a few mouthfuls of insipid broth and the cabbage stew with pieces of fish. When the guard came to take away the dishes, Roger asked his permission to clean the bucket of excrement and urine. Once a day he was allowed to go to the latrine to empty and rinse it. When he returned to his cell, he lay down again on his cot. The smiling, beautiful face of Eivind/Lucifer came to mind again, and with it, dejection and the sharp pangs of bitterness. He heard Eivind murmur “I love you” in his ear and it seemed he embraced him and pressed him close. He heard himself moan.

He had traveled a great deal, had intense experiences, known all kinds of people, investigated horrible crimes against primitive peoples and indigenous communities on two continents. And was it possible he would be left stupefied by so duplicitous, unscrupulous, and base a personality as that of the Scandinavian Lucifer? He had lied to him, systematically deceived him at the same time he appeared to be cheerful, useful, and affectionate as he accompanied Roger like a faithful dog, served him, took an interest in his health, went to buy him medicines, called the doctor, took his temperature. But he also took all the money from him that he could. And then he invented trips to Norway on the pretext of visiting his mother, his sister, in order to run to the consulate and report on the conspiratorial, political, and military activities of his superior and lover. And there he charged them as well for those accusations. And Roger had thought he was the one managing the thread of the plot! Roger had instructed Eivind, since the British wanted to kill him—according to the Norwegian, Consul Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay had literally assured him of it—to continue on course until he obtained proof of the criminal intentions of British functionaries toward him. For how many kroner or pounds sterling had Eivind communicated this to the consul? And therefore, what Roger believed would be a devastating publicity campaign against the British government—accusing it publicly of planning the murder of its adversaries and violating the sovereignty of third countries—did not have the slightest repercussions. His public letter to Sir Edward Grey, a copy of which he had sent to all the governments represented in Berlin, did not even merit acknowledgement of its receipt at a single embassy.

But the worst—Roger again felt that pressure in his stomach—came later, at the end of his long interrogations in Scotland Yard, when he believed Eivind/Lucifer would not permeate those dialogues again. The final blow! The name of Roger Casement was in all the newspapers of Europe and the world—a British diplomat knighted and decorated by the Crown was going to be tried as a traitor to his country—and news of his imminent trial was announced everywhere. Then, Eivind Adler appeared in the British consulate in Philadelphia, proposing, with the consul as intermediary, to travel to England to testify against Roger, as long as the British government would cover all his travel and lodging expenses “and he would receive acceptable remuneration.” Roger did not doubt for a second the authenticity of the report from the British consul in Philadelphia that Hall and Thomson showed him. Fortunately, the rubicund face of the Scandinavian Satan did not appear in the witnesses’ dock during the four days of his trial in the Old Bailey. Because when he saw him perhaps Roger would not have been able to contain his rage and the longing to strangle him.

Was that the face, the mentality, the viperish contortion of original sin? In one of his conversations with Edmund D. Morel, when both were wondering how it was possible for cultured, civilized people who had received a Christian education to perpetrate and take part in the horrifying crimes both men had documented in the Congo, Roger said: “When there are no more historical, sociological, psychological, cultural explanations, there is still a vast field in darkness where you can reach the root of evil in human beings, Bulldog. If you want to understand it, there is a single path: stop reasoning and turn to religion: it is original sin.”

“That explanation doesn’t explain anything, Tiger.”

They argued for a long time without reaching a conclusion. Morel affirmed: “If the ultimate reason for evil is original sin, then there is no solution. If we humans are made for evil and carry it in our souls, why fight to find a remedy for what is irremediable?”

Bulldog was right, one mustn’t fall into pessimism. Not all human beings were Eivind Adler Christensen. There were others, noble, idealistic, good, and generous, like Captain Robert Monteith and Morel himself. Roger grew sad. Bulldog had not signed any of the petitions in his favor. No doubt he disapproved of his friend (former friend now, like Herbert Ward?) taking Germany’s side. Even though he opposed the war and waged a pacifist campaign and had been tried for it, no doubt Morel did not forgive him for his support of the Kaiser. Perhaps, like Conrad, he also considered him a traitor.

Roger sighed. He had lost many admirable, dear friends, like these two. How many more had turned their backs on him! But in spite of everything, he hadn’t changed his way of thinking. No, he had not been wrong. He still believed that in this conflict, if Germany won, Ireland would be closer to independence. And further away from it if victory favored Britain. He had done what he did not for Germany but for Ireland. Couldn’t men as lucid and intelligent as Ward, Conrad, and Morel understand that?

Patriotism blinded lucidity. Alice had affirmed this in a hard-fought debate during one of the evening get-togethers at her house on Grosvenor Road that Roger always recalled with so much nostalgia. What had the historian said exactly? “We should not allow patriotism to do violence to our lucidity, our reason, our intelligence.” Something like that. But then he remembered the ironic dart thrown by George Bernard Shaw at all the Irish nationalists present: “They’re irreconcilable, Alice. Make no mistake: patriotism is a religion, the enemy of lucidity. It is pure obscurantism, an act of faith.” He said this with the mocking irony that always made the people he spoke to uncomfortable, because everyone intuited that beneath what the dramatist said in a genial way there was always a destructive intention. “Act of faith” in the mouth of this skeptic and unbeliever meant “superstition, fraud” or even worse. Still, this man who did not believe in anything and railed against everything was a great writer and had brought more prestige to Irish letters than any other of his generation. How could you construct a great work without being a patriot, without feeling that profound kinship to the land of your forebears, without loving and being moved by the ancient lineage behind you? For that reason, if asked to choose between two great creators, Roger secretly preferred Yeats to Shaw. The first was certainly a patriot who had nourished his poetry and theater with the old Irish and Celtic legends, adapting them, renovating them, demonstrating they were alive and could bear fruit in present-day literature. An instant later he regretted having thought this way. How could he be ungrateful to George Bernard Shaw: among the great intellectual figures in London, in spite of his skepticism and articles against nationalism, no one had acted more explicitly and courageously in defense of Roger Casement than the dramatist. He advised a line of defense to his lawyer that, unfortunately, poor Serjeant A. M. Sullivan, that greedy nonentity, did not accept, and after the sentence, George Bernard Shaw wrote articles and signed manifestos in favor of commuting the death penalty. One did not have to be a patriot and nationalist to be generous and brave.

Having thought of Serjeant Sullivan demoralized him, made him relive his trial for high treason in the Old Bailey, those four sinister days at the end of June 1916. It had been in no way easy to find a litigant attorney who would agree to defend him in the High Court. Everyone that George Gavan Duffy, his family, and his friends contacted in Dublin and London refused on a variety of pretexts. No one wanted to defend a traitor to his country in wartime. Finally, the Irishman Sullivan, who had never defended anyone before a London court, agreed, though he did demand an excessive sum of money that Roger’s sister Nina and Alice Stopford Green had to collect by means of donations from those sympathetic to the Irish cause. Going against Roger’s wishes, for he wanted to openly accept responsibility as a rebel and fighter for independence and use the trial as a platform to proclaim Ireland’s right to sovereignty, Sullivan imposed a legalistic, formal defense, avoiding the political and maintaining that the statute of Edward III under which Roger was being tried applied only to acts of treason in the territory of the Crown, not abroad. The acts the accused was charged with committing had taken place in Germany, and therefore Casement could not be considered a traitor to the Empire. Roger never believed this defense strategy would succeed. To make matters even worse, on the day he made his statement, Serjeant Sullivan presented a pitiable spectacle. Shortly after beginning his argument he began shaking, convulsing, until overcome by a corpselike pallor, he exclaimed: “Your Honors! I cannot continue!” and fell to the courtroom floor in a faint. One of his assistants had to conclude his statement. Just as well that Roger, in his final exposition, was able to take over his own defense, declaring himself a rebel, defending the Easter Rising, asking for the independence of his country, and saying he was proud to have served it. That text filled him with pride and, he thought, would justify him to future generations.

What time was it? He couldn’t become accustomed to not knowing the time. What thick walls Pentonville Prison had, because no matter how closely he listened, he never could hear sounds from the street: bells, motors, shouts, voices, whistles. The din of Islington Market, did he really hear it or did he invent it? He no longer knew. Nothing. At this moment, a strange sepulchral silence seemed to suspend time and life. The only noises that filtered into his cell came from inside the prison: muffled steps in the corridor outside, metal doors opening and closing, the sheriff’s nasal voice giving orders to a jailer. Now no sound reached him, not even from the interior of the prison. The silence filled him with distress and kept him from thinking. He tried to resume his reading of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, but he couldn’t concentrate and put the book back on the floor. He attempted to pray but the prayer seemed so mechanical, he stopped. He was motionless for a long time, tense, uneasy, his mind blank and his gaze fixed on a point in the ceiling that seemed damp, as if there were a leak, until he fell asleep.

He had a quiet dream that took him to the Amazonian jungles on a luminous, sunny morning. The breeze blowing over the bridge of the ship attenuated the devastating heat. There were no mosquitoes and he felt well, without the burning in his eyes that had tormented him recently, an infection seemingly invulnerable to all the drops and washes of the ophthalmologists, without the muscular pains of arthritis, or the fire of hemorrhoids that at times seemed like burning metal in his intestines, or the swelling of his feet. He didn’t suffer from any of those discomforts, diseases, and ailments, the aftermath of his twenty years in Africa. He was young again and wanted to do here, in the exceedingly wide Amazon River whose banks he could not even see, one of those mad acts he had done so often in Africa: strip and dive from the railing of the ship into the water green with clumps of grass and splashed with foam. He would feel the impact of the warm, dense water all over his body, a benign, purifying sensation, as he propelled himself up to the surface, emerged, and began to swim, gliding with the ease and elegance of a dolphin to the side of the boat. From the deck the captain and some passengers would make exaggerated gestures for him to get back in the boat, not run the risk of drowning or being devoured by a yacumama, one of the river snakes that sometimes were ten meters long and could swallow a man whole.

Was he near Manaus? Tabatinga? Putumayo? Iquitos? Was he sailing up or down the river? It made no difference. The important thing was that he felt better than he had for a long time, and as the boat moved slowly on the green surface, the drone of the motor cradling his thoughts, Roger reviewed once again what his future would be like now that he finally had renounced diplomacy and recovered total freedom. He would give up his London flat on Ebury Street and go to Ireland. He would divide his time between Dublin and Ulster. He would not devote his entire life to politics. He would reserve one hour a day, one day a week, one week a month for study. He would resume learning Irish and one day would surprise Alice by speaking to her in fluent Gaelic. And the hours, days, weeks devoted to politics would concentrate on great politics that had to do with the primary, central plan—the independence of Ireland and the struggle against colonialism—and he would refuse to waste his time on the intrigues, rivalries, competitiveness of hack politicians eager to win small areas of power, in the party, the cell, the brigade, even though to do so, they would have to forget and even sabotage the essential task. He would travel a great deal in Ireland, long excursions through the glens of Antrim and Donegal, through Ulster, Galway, and remote, isolated places such as the district of Connemara and Tory Island, where the fishermen knew no English and spoke only Gaelic, and he would get along with the peasants, artisans, fishermen who, with their stoicism, hard work, and patience, had resisted the crushing presence of the colonizer, preserving their language, their customs, their beliefs. He would listen to them, learn from them, write essays and poems about the silent, heroic, centuries-long saga of those humble people thanks to whom Ireland had not disappeared and was still a nation.

A metallic noise pulled him out of that pleasant dream. He opened his eyes. The jailer had come in and handed him a large bowl with the semolina soup and piece of bread that was every night’s supper. He was about to ask the time but refrained because he knew the man wouldn’t answer. He broke the bread into small pieces, put them in the soup, and ate it in widely spaced spoonsful. Another day had passed and perhaps tomorrow would be the decisive one.

X

The night before he sailed on the Liberal for Putumayo, Roger Casement decided to speak frankly to Stirs. During the thirteen days he spent in Iquitos he’d had many conversations with the British consul but hadn’t dared bring up the subject with him. He knew his mission had earned him a good number of enemies, not only in Iquitos but in the entire Amazonian region; it was absurd to also estrange a colleague who could be of great use to him in the days and weeks to come if he found himself in serious difficulty with the rubber barons. Better not to mention this indelicate matter to him.

And yet that night, as he and the consul were drinking their usual glass of port in Stirs’s small living room, listening to the clatter of rain on the tin roof and the spouts of water beating on the windows and the terrace railing, Roger abandoned his prudence.

“What opinion do you have of Father Ricardo Urrutia, Stirs?”

“The superior of the Augustinians? I don’t know him very well. In general, my opinion is good. You’ve seen a great deal of him recently, haven’t you?”

Did the consul guess they were entering shaky ground? In his small bulging eyes there was an uneasy gleam. His bald head shone in the light of the oil lamp sputtering on the little table in the middle of the room.

“Well, Father Urrutia has been here barely a year and hasn’t left Iquitos,” said Roger. “So he doesn’t know a great deal about what occurs on the rubber plantations in Putumayo. On the other hand, he’s spoken to me about another human drama in the city.”

The consul savored a mouthful of port. He began to fan himself again and Roger thought his round face had reddened slightly. Outside, the storm roared with long, muffled claps of thunder, and at times a flash of lightning lit the darkness of the forest for an instant.

“The one about the little girls and boys stolen from the tribes,” Roger continued. “Brought here and sold to families for twenty or thirty soles.”

Stirs remained silent, observing him. He was fanning himself furiously now.

“According to Father Urrutia, almost all the servants in Iquitos were stolen and sold,” Roger added, looking fixedly into the consul’s eyes. “Is that the case?”

Stirs heaved a prolonged sigh and moved in his rocking chair, not hiding an expression of annoyance. His face seemed to say: You don’t know how happy I am that you’re leaving tomorrow for Putumayo. I really hope we don’t see each other again, Mr. Casement.

“Didn’t those things occur in the Congo?” he replied evasively.

“Yes, they did occur, though not in the general way they do here. Forgive my impertinence. The four servants you have, did you hire them or buy them?”

“I inherited them,” the British consul said drily. “They came with the house when my predecessor, Consul Cazes, left for England. You can’t say I hired them because that’s not the custom here in Iquitos. The four of them are illiterate and wouldn’t know how to read or sign a contract. They sleep and eat in my house, I clothe them and tip them as well, something that isn’t frequent in this territory, I assure you. They are free to leave whenever they like. Speak to them and ask them if they’d like to find work elsewhere. You’ll see their reaction, Mr. Casement.”

Roger nodded and sipped at his glass of port.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he apologized. “I’m trying to understand the country I’m in, the values and customs of Iquitos. I have no desire for you to look on me as an inquisitor.”

Now the consul’s expression was hostile. He moved the fan slowly and in his gaze was apprehension as well as hatred.

“Not as an inquisitor but as righteous,” he corrected him, making another grimace of dislike. “Or, if you prefer, a hero. I’ve already told you, I don’t like heroes. Don’t take my frankness in the wrong way. As for the rest, don’t have any hopes. You’re not going to change what happens here, Mr. Casement. And Father Urrutia won’t either. In a certain sense, for these children, what happens to them is a stroke of luck. Being servants, I mean. It would be a thousand times worse if they grew up in the tribes, eating their own lice, dying of fevers or some other epidemic before they’re ten, or working like animals on the rubber plantations. They live better here. I know my pragmatism will displease you.”

Roger said nothing. He knew now what he wanted to know. And also that from now on the British consul in Iquitos would probably be another enemy he ought to watch out for.

“I’ve come here to serve my country on a consular assignment,” Stirs added, looking at the fiber mat on the floor. “I carry it out with precision, I assure you. I know the British citizens, who don’t number many, and I defend and serve them in every way necessary. I do all I can to encourage trade between Amazonia and the British Empire. I keep my government informed regarding commercial activity, ships that come and go, any border incidents. Combating slavery or the abuses committed by the mestizos and whites of Peru against the Amazonian Indians is not one of my obligations.”

“I’m sorry to have offended you, Stirs. Let’s not speak of the matter again.”

Roger stood, said good night to the master of the house, and retired to his room. The storm had subsided but it was still raining. The terrace next to the bedroom was soaked. There was a dense odor of plants and wet earth. The night was dark and the sound of insects intense, as if they were not only in the forest but inside the room. With the rain another downpour had fallen: the black beetles called vinchucas. Tomorrow their corpses would carpet the terrace, and if you stepped on them, they would crack like nuts and stain the floor with dark blood. He undressed, put on his pajamas, and got into bed under the mosquito net.

He had been imprudent, of course. Offending the consul, a poor man, perhaps a good man, who was merely waiting to reach his retirement without becoming involved in problems, return to England, and bury himself in tending the garden of the cottage in Surrey he probably had been paying for gradually with his savings. That’s what he should have done, and then he would have fewer ailments in his body and less anguish in his soul.

He recalled his violent argument on the Huayna, the ship on which he traveled from Tabatinga, the border between Peru and Brazil, to Iquitos, with the rubber planter Victor Israel, a Maltese Jew, who had lived in Amazonia for many years and with whom he’d had long and very diverting conversations on the terrace of the boat. Victor Israel dressed in an eccentric manner, always seemed to be in disguise, spoke impeccable English, and while they played poker recounted with great charm his adventurous life, which seemed to have come from a picaresque novel, drinking glasses of cognac that the planter loved. He had the awful habit of shooting with a huge old-fashioned pistol at the pink herons that flew over the boat, but, happily, rarely hit one. Until, one fine day, Roger did not remember why, Victor Israel defended Julio C. Arana. The man was taking Amazonia out of savagery and integrating it into the modern world. He defended the correrías, thanks to which, he said, there were still laborers to harvest the rubber. Because the great problem in the jungle was a lack of workers to collect the precious substance the Maker had wanted to present as a gift to the region and a blessing to the Peruvians. This “manna from heaven” was being squandered because of the laziness and stupidity of the savages who refused to work as harvesters of latex and obliged the planters to go to the tribes and take them by force. Which meant a great loss of time and money for the enterprises.

“Well, that’s one way of looking at things,” Roger interrupted tersely. “There’s also another way.”

Victor Israel was a long, very thin man with white streaks in his mane of straight hair that reached to his shoulders. He had several days’ growth of beard on his large bony face and dark, triangular, somewhat Mephistophelian eyes that fixed on Roger disconcertedly. He wore a red vest and, over that, suspenders as well as a brightly colored scarf.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m referring to the point of view of the people you call savages,” Roger explained in a lighthearted tone, as if he were talking about the weather or the mosquitoes. “Put yourself in their place for a moment. There they are, in their villages, where they’ve lived for years, or centuries. One day some white or mestizo gentlemen come with rifles and revolvers and demand that they abandon their families, their plantings, their houses, to go and harvest rubber dozens or hundreds of miles away, for the benefit of strangers whose only reason is the force at their disposal. Would you go willingly to harvest your famous latex, Don Victor?”

“I’m not a savage who lives naked, worships the yacumama, and drowns his children if they’re born with a harelip,” replied the planter with a sardonic guffaw that accentuated his irritation. “Do you put the cannibals of Amazonia on the same plane as the pioneers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who work in heroic conditions and risk our lives to transform these forests into a civilized land?”

“Perhaps you and I have different concepts of what civilization is, my friend,” said Roger, always in that comradely tone that seemed to irritate Victor Israel beyond measure.

At the same poker table were Walter Folk and Henry Fielgald, while the other members of the commission had gone to lie in their hammocks and rest. It was a calm, warm night, and a full moon illuminated the water of the Amazon with silvery brilliance.

“I’d like to know what your idea of civilization is,” said Victor Israel. His eyes and voice were throwing off sparks. His irritation was so great that Roger wondered if the planter would not suddenly pull out the archaeological revolver he carried in his holster and shoot him.

“It could be summed up by saying that it’s an idea of a society where private property and individual liberty are respected,” he explained very calmly, all his senses alert in case Victor Israel meant to attack him. “For example, British laws prohibit colonists from occupying indigenous lands in the colonies. And they also prohibit, under pain of imprisonment, employing force against natives who refuse to work in the mines or camps. You don’t believe that’s civilization, do you? Or am I wrong?”

Victor Israel’s thin chest rose and fell, agitating the strange blouse with loose sleeves he wore buttoned to the neck, and the red vest. He had both thumbs caught in his suspenders and his narrow, triangular eyes were as red as if they were bleeding. His open mouth displayed a row of uneven teeth stained with nicotine.

“According to that criterion,” he stated, mocking and offensive, “Peruvians would have to allow Amazonia to remain in the Stone Age for the rest of eternity, in order not to offend the pagans or occupy lands they don’t know what to do with because they’re lazy and don’t want to work. Waste a resource that could raise the standard of living for Peruvians and make Peru a modern country. Is that what the British Crown proposes for this country, Señor Casement?”

“Amazonia is a great emporium of resources, no doubt,” Roger agreed, without becoming agitated. “Nothing more just than that Peru should take advantage of it. But not by abusing the natives, or hunting them down like animals, or forcing them to work as slaves. Rather, by incorporating them into civilization by means of schools, hospitals, and churches.”

Victor Israel burst into laughter, shaking like a puppet on springs.

“What a world you live in, Consul!” he exclaimed, raising his hands with their long, skeletal fingers in a theatrical way. “It’s obvious you’ve never seen a cannibal in your life. Do you know how many Christians have been eaten here by the natives? How many whites and cholos they’ve killed with their spears and poisoned darts? How many have had their heads shrunk, the way the Shapras do? Let’s talk when you have a little more experience of barbarism.”

“I lived close to twenty years in Africa and know something about those things, Señor Israel,” Roger assured him. “By the way, I met a good number of whites there who thought the way you do.”

To keep the disagreement from becoming even more bitter, Walter Folk and Henry Fielgald turned the conversation to less thorny subjects. Tonight, in his wakefulness, after ten days in Iquitos interviewing all kinds of people, of writing down dozens of opinions gathered here and there from authorities, judges, military men, restaurant owners, fishermen, pimps, vagrants, prostitutes and waiters in brothels and bars, Roger told himself that the immense majority of the whites and mestizos in Iquitos, Peruvians and foreigners, thought as Victor Israel did. For them the Amazonian indigenous people were not, strictly speaking, human beings, but an inferior, contemptible form of existence, closer to animals than civilized people. That’s why it was legitimate to exploit them, whip them, abduct them, take them to the rubber plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like rabid dogs. It was so generalized a view of the Indian that, as Father Ricardo Urrutia said, no one was shocked that the domestic servants in Iquitos were girls and boys stolen and sold to Loretan families for the equivalent of one or two pounds sterling. Anguish obliged him to open his mouth and breathe deeply until air reached his lungs. If he had seen and learned these things in this city, what wouldn’t he see in Putumayo?

The members of the commission left Iquitos on September 14, 1910, mid-morning. Roger had hired Frederick Bishop, one of the Barbadians he interviewed, as an interpreter. Bishop spoke Spanish and assured him he could understand and make himself understood in the two most common indigenous languages spoken on the rubber plantations: Bora and Huitoto. The Liberal, the largest of the fleet of fifteen ships belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company, was well maintained. It had small cabins, each accommodating two travelers. There were hammocks in the prow and stern for those who preferred to sleep outdoors. Bishop was afraid to go back to Putumayo and asked Roger for a written guarantee that the commission would protect him during the journey and afterward the British government would repatriate him to Barbados.

The passage from Iquitos to La Chorrera, capital of the enormous territory between the Napo and Caquetá Rivers where Julio C. Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company had its operations, lasted for eight days of heat, clouds of mosquitoes, boredom, and the monotony of the landscape and the noises. The ship sailed down the Amazon, whose width, once they had left Iquitos, grew until its banks became invisible, crossed the Brazilian border in Tabatinga, continued down the Yavarí, and then reentered Peru along the Igara Paraná. On this stretch of river the banks were closer and at times the vines and branches of extremely tall trees hung over the deck. They heard and saw flocks of parrots zigzagging and screeching in the trees, or solemn pink herons taking the sun on an islet and balancing on one leg, turtle shells whose brown color stood out in somewhat paler water, and, at times, the bristling back of an alligator dozing in the mud of the bank and shot at with rifles or revolvers from the boat.

Roger spent a good part of the crossing arranging his notes and notebooks from Iquitos and outlining a work plan for the months he would spend in the territories of Julio C. Arana. According to the Foreign Office’s instructions, he was to interview only the Barbadians who worked at the stations, because they were British citizens, leaving the employees from Peru and other nations alone in order not to wound the sensitivities of the Peruvian government. But he didn’t intend to respect those limits. His investigation would be left one-eyed, maimed, and crippled if he didn’t also obtain information from the station chiefs, their “boys” or “rationals”—Hispanicized Indians responsible for guarding the works and dispensing punishments—and from the indigenous people themselves. Only in this way would he have a complete vision of how Arana’s company violated laws and ethics in its relations with the natives.

In Iquitos, Pablo Zumaeta informed the members of the commission that on Arana’s instructions, the company had sent ahead to Putumayo one of its principal officers, Señor Juan Tizón, to receive them and facilitate their travel from place to place and their work. The commissioners supposed the real reason for Tizón’s trip to Putumayo was to hide evidence of abuses and present a cosmetic image of reality.

They arrived in La Chorrera, or the Rapids, at midday on September 22, 1910. The name of the place was due to the torrents and waterfalls caused by an abrupt narrowing of the riverbed, a tumultuous, magnificent spectacle of foam, noise, wet rocks, and whirlpools that broke the monotonous flow of the Igara Paraná, the tributary on whose banks the general headquarters of the Peruvian Amazon Company were located. To move from the dock to the offices and residences of La Chorrera, it was necessary to climb a steep slope of mud and brambles. The travelers’ boots sank into the mud and sometimes, in order not to fall, they had to lean on the Indian porters carrying the luggage. As he greeted those who had come out to receive them, Roger, with a small shudder, confirmed that one out of every three or four of the half-naked Indians carrying their baggage or looking at them curiously from the bank, smacking their arms with open hands to chase the mosquitoes, had on their backs, buttocks, and thighs scars that could have come only from floggings. The Congo, yes, the Congo was everywhere.

Juan Tizón was a tall man, dressed in white, very courteous with aristocratic manners, who spoke enough English to be understood. He must have been close to fifty, and because of his carefully shaved face, small trimmed mustache, fine hands and clothing, it was obvious from miles away that he was not in his element here in the middle of the jungle, but was a man of offices, salons, the city. He welcomed them in English and in Spanish and introduced his companion, whose mere name produced repugnance in Roger: Víctor Macedo, chief of La Chorrera. He, at least, hadn’t fled. The articles of Saldaña Roca and those by Hardenburg in the magazine Truth in London singled him out as one of the cruelest of Arana’s lieutenants in Putumayo.

As they climbed the slope, he observed Macedo. He was a man of indeterminate age, husky, on the short side, a light-skinned cholo but with the somewhat Asian features of an Indian, a flat nose, a mouth with very full lips that were always open, revealing two or three gold teeth, the hard expression of someone weathered by the outdoors. Unlike the newcomers, he climbed the steep hill easily. He had a rather oblique gaze, as if he looked sideways to avoid the glare of the sun or because he was afraid to face people. Tizón was unarmed, but Víctor Macedo wore a revolver in his belt.

In a very large clearing, there were wooden buildings on pilings—thick tree trunks or cement columns—with verandas on the second floor, the larger ones with corrugated roofs, the smaller ones with roofs of braided palm leaves. Tizón was talking as he pointed—“There are the offices … Those are rubber storerooms … All of you will stay in this house”—but Roger barely heard him. He was observing the groups of partly or completely naked Indians who looked at them indifferently or avoided looking at them at all: men, women, and sickly children, some with paint on their faces and chests, their legs as skinny as reeds, pale yellowish skin, and sometimes incisions and pendants in their lips and ears that reminded him of the African natives. But there were no blacks here. The few mulatto and dark-skinned men he could see wore trousers and boots and undoubtedly were part of the contingent from Barbados. He counted four. He recognized the “boys,” or “rationals,” immediately, for though they were Indian and barefoot they had cut their hair and combed it like “Christians,” wore trousers and shirts, and had clubs and whips hanging from their belts.

While the other members of the commission had to sleep two in a room, Roger had the privilege of a room to himself. It was small, with a hammock instead of a bed and a piece of furniture that could be both trunk and desk. On a small table were a basin, a pitcher of water, and a mirror. They explained to him that on the first floor, beside the entrance, were a septic tank and a shower. As soon as he had settled in and put away his things, before he sat down to have lunch, Roger told Juan Tizón he wanted to interview all the Barbadians in La Chorrera, beginning that afternoon.

By then the rank, penetrating, oily stench, similar to the smell of rotting plants and leaves, was in his nostrils. It saturated every corner of La Chorrera and would accompany him morning, noon, and night for the three months of his stay in Putumayo, a smell he never became accustomed to, that made him vomit and retch, a pestilence that seemed to come from the air, the earth, objects, and human beings, and from then on would become for Roger the symbol of the evil and suffering that greed for the rubber exuded by the trees in Amazonia had exacerbated to dizzying extremes. “It’s curious,” he remarked to Tizón on the day of his arrival. “In the Congo I was often on rubber plantations and rubber depositories. But I don’t recall Congolese latex giving off so strong and unpleasant an odor.” “They’re different varieties,” Tizón explained. “This smells more and is also stronger than African rubber. They sprinkle talc on the bales going to Europe to reduce the stink.”

The number of Barbadians in the entire region of Putumayo was 196, but there were only six in La Chorrera. Two refused from the outset to talk to Roger, even though he, with the intervention of Bishop, assured them their testimony would be private and in no case would they be indicted for what they told him, and that he personally would take care of returning them to Barbados if they did not wish to continue working for Arana’s company.

The four who agreed to give testimony had been in Putumayo close to seven years and had served the Peruvian Amazon Company at different stations as overseers, a position halfway between the chiefs and the “boys,” or “rationals.” The first one he spoke to, Donal Francis, a tall, strong black who limped and had a clouded eye, was so nervous and distrustful that Roger immediately assumed he wouldn’t obtain much from him. He responded in monosyllables and denied every accusation. According to him, in La Chorrera chiefs, employees, and “even the savages” got along very well. There were never problems, much less violence. He had been carefully coached regarding what he had to say and do before the commission.

Roger perspired profusely. He kept sipping water. Would the other interviews with Barbadians in Putumayo be as useless as this one? They weren’t. Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy, especially the third, after overcoming an initial caution and receiving Roger’s promise, in the name of the British government, that they would be repatriated to Barbados, began to talk, to tell everything and incriminate themselves vehemently, at times frantically, as if impatient to unburden their conscience. Stanley Sealy, a small mulatto, illustrated his testimony with so many details and examples that, in spite of his long experience of human atrocities, Roger at certain moments became dizzy and felt an anguish that barely allowed him to breathe. When the Barbadian finished speaking, night had fallen. The hum of nocturnal insects seemed thunderous, as if thousands were flying around them. They were sitting on a wooden bench on the terrace that led to Roger’s bedroom. Between the two of them they had smoked a pack of cigarettes. In the growing darkness, Roger could no longer see Sealy’s features, only the outline of his head and muscular arms. He had been in La Chorrera a short time. He had worked for two years at the Abisinia station, the right arm of the chiefs Abelardo Agüero and Augusto Jiménez, and before that at Matanzas, with Armando Normand. They both were silent. Roger felt mosquitoes biting his face, neck, and arms but did not have the energy to drive them away.

Suddenly he realized that Sealy was crying. He had brought his hands to his face and sobbed slowly, with sighs that filled his chest. Roger saw the gleam of tears in his eyes.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked. “Are you a religious person?”

“I was as a boy, I think,” the mulatto moaned, his voice breaking. “My godmother would take me to church on Sunday, back in St. Patrick, the village where I was born. Now, I don’t know.”

“I ask because it probably will help you to talk to God. I’m not saying to pray, just to talk. Try it. As frankly as you’ve talked to me. Tell Him what you’re feeling, why you’re crying. In any case, He can help you more than I can. I don’t know how. I feel as upset as you do.”

Like Lawrence and Greenwich, Sealy was prepared to repeat his testimony to the members of the commission and even to Señor Tizón, as long as he could stay close to Roger and travel with him to Iquitos and then to Barbados.

Roger went into his room, lit the oil lamps, removed his shirt, and washed his chest, underarms, and face with water from the basin. He would have liked to take a shower but would have had to go downstairs and do it outdoors, and he knew his body would be devoured by the mosquitoes that multiplied in numbers and ferocity at night.

He went down to the ground floor for supper in a dining room lit by oil lamps. Juan Tizón and his travel companions were drinking lukewarm, watery whiskey. They stood and talked, while three or four half-naked indigenous servants carried in fried and baked fish, boiled yucca, sweet potatoes, and corn flour with which they powdered food just as the Brazilians did with farinha. Others drove flies away with straw fans.

“How did things go with the Barbadians?” Tizón asked, handing him a glass of whiskey.

“Better than I expected, Señor Tizón. I was afraid they’d be reluctant to talk. But just the opposite. Three of them spoke with total frankness.”

“I hope you share with me the complaints you receive,” said Tizón, half joking, half serious. “The company wants to correct what it lacks and improve. That has always been Señor Arana’s policy. Well, I imagine you must be hungry. To the table, gentlemen!”

They sat and began to help themselves from the various serving dishes. The members of the commission had spent the afternoon looking over the installations in La Chorrera and, with Bishop’s help, conversing with the employees in administration and the storehouses. They all seemed tired and not very interested in talking. Could their experiences this first day have been as depressing as his?

Tizón offered them wine but, since he had warned them that with transportation and the climate, French wine arrived here disturbed and at times sour, everyone preferred to continue with whiskey.

Halfway through the meal, Roger remarked, glancing at the Indians serving them:

“I’ve seen that many native men and women in La Chorrera have scars on their backs, buttocks, and thighs. That girl, for example. How many lashes do they receive as a rule when they’re whipped?”

A general silence fell in which the sputtering of the oil lamps and the hum of the insects increased. Everyone looked at Juan Tizón very seriously.

“Most of the time they make those scars themselves,” he stated, uncomfortably. “In their tribes they have fairly barbaric initiation rites, you know, like making holes in their faces, lips, ears, noses, to insert rings, teeth, and all kinds of pendants. I don’t deny some might have been made by overseers who did not respect the company’s orders. Our regulations categorically prohibit physical punishment.”

“That wasn’t the intention of my question, Señor Tizón,” Roger apologized. “I meant that even though so many scars are visible, I haven’t seen any Indians with the company’s brand on their bodies.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tizón replied, lowering his fork.

“The Barbadians explained to me that many indigenous people are branded with the company initials: CA, that is, Casa Arana. Like cows, horses, and pigs. So they won’t escape or be taken by Colombian rubber planters. They themselves had branded many of them. Sometimes with fire, and sometimes with a knife. But I still haven’t seen anyone with the brand. What happened to them, Señor?”

Tizón suddenly lost his composure and elegant manners. He had turned red and trembled with indignation.

“I will not allow you to speak to me in that tone,” he exclaimed, mixing English and Spanish. “I’m here to facilitate your work, not to suffer your ironic remarks.”

Roger agreed, not changing expression.

“I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said calmly. “It’s just that even though I was witness to unspeakable cruelties in the Congo, I haven’t yet seen the branding of human beings with fire or a knife. I’m sure you’re not responsible for this atrocity.”

“Of course I’m not responsible for any atrocity!” Tizón raised his voice again, gesticulating. He rolled his eyes in their sockets, beside himself. “If atrocities are committed, it’s not the fault of the company. Don’t you see what kind of place this is, Señor Casement? Here there is no authority, no police, no judges, nothing. Those who work here, as chiefs, overseers, assistants, are not educated people but, in many cases, illiterate adventurers, rough men hardened by the jungle. At times they commit abuses that would horrify a civilized man. I know that very well. We do what we can, believe me. Señor Arana agrees with you. Everyone who has committed outrages will be dismissed. I’m not an accomplice to any injustice, Señor Casement. I have a respected name, a family that means something in this country, I’m a Catholic who practices his religion.”

Roger thought Tizón probably believed what he was saying. A good man, who in Iquitos, Manaus, Lima, or London would not know or want to know what went on here. He probably cursed the hour it occurred to Julio C. Arana to send him to this godforsaken corner of the world to carry out a thankless assignment and suffer a thousand discomforts and difficulties.

“We ought to work together, collaborate,” Tizón repeated, somewhat calmer, moving his hands a great deal. “What is going badly will be corrected. The employees who have committed atrocities will be sanctioned. I give you my word of honor! All I ask is that you see me as a friend, someone who’s on your side.”

Shortly afterward, Tizón said he wasn’t feeling very well and preferred to retire. He said good night and left.

Only the members of the commission remained at the table.

“Branded like animals?” murmured Walter Folk, with a skeptical air. “Can that be true?”

“Three of the four Barbadians I questioned today assured me of that,” Roger asserted. “Stanley Sealy says he did it himself, at the Abisinia station, on the orders of his chief, Abelardo Agüero. But I don’t think branding is the worst thing. I heard even more terrible things this afternoon.”

They continued talking, not eating a mouthful, until they had finished the two bottles of whiskey on the table. The commissioners were affected deeply by the scars on the backs of the Indians and by the pillory or rack for torture they had discovered in one of the La Chorrera warehouses where rubber was stored. With Señor Tizón present, who experienced a very difficult time, Bishop explained how that framework of wood and ropes worked, how the Indian was placed in it and forced into a squatting position, unable to move his arms or legs. He was tortured by adjustments of the wooden bars or by being suspended in midair. Bishop explained that the pillory was always in the center of the clearing in every station. They asked one of the “rationals” at the warehouse when the device had been brought inside. The boy said only on the eve of their arrival.

They decided the commission would listen the next day to Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy. Seymour Bell suggested that Juan Tizón be present. There were divergent opinions, especially from Walter Folk, who feared that before the high-level official, the Barbadians would retract what they had said.

That night Roger did not close his eyes. He made notes on his conversations with the Barbadians until the lamp went out because there was no more oil. He lay down on his hammock and remained awake, dozing for a moment and then waking with aching bones and muscles, unable to shake off the uneasiness that afflicted him.

And the Peruvian Amazon Company was a British firm! On its board of directors were individuals highly respected in the world of business and in the City, such as Sir John Lister-Kaye, the Baron de Sousa-Deiro, John Russell Gubbins, and Henry M. Read. What would those partners of Julio C. Arana say when they read in the report he would present to the government that the enterprise they had legitimized with their name and money practiced slavery, obtaining harvesters of rubber and servants by means of correrías by armed thugs who captured indigenous men, women, and children and took them to the rubber plantations, where they were exploited iniquitously, hanged from the pillory, branded with fire and knife, and whipped until they bled to death if they didn’t bring in the minimum quota of thirty kilos of rubber every three months. Roger had been in the offices of the Peruvian Amazon Company in Salisbury House, E.C., in the financial center of London. A spectacular place, with Gainsborough landscapes on the walls, uniformed secretaries, carpeted offices, leather sofas for visitors, and a multitude of clerks in striped trousers, black frock coats, and shirts with stiff white collars and cravats, keeping accounts, sending and receiving telegrams, selling and collecting remittances for powdered, odoriferous rubber in all the industrial cities of Europe. And, at the other end of the world, in Putumayo, Huitotos, Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, and Boras were gradually being exterminated without anyone moving a finger to change that state of affairs.

“Why haven’t these indigenous people attempted to rebel?” the botanist Walter Folk had asked during supper. And he added: “It’s true they don’t have firearms. But there are so many of them, they could rebel, and though some would die, they would defeat their tormenters by dint of numbers.” Roger replied that it wasn’t so simple. They didn’t rebel for the same reasons the Congolese hadn’t in Africa. Revolt was an exceptional occurrence, localized and sporadic suicidal acts by an individual or a small group. Because when the system of exploitation was so extreme, it destroyed spirits even before bodies. The violence that victimized them annihilated the will to resist, the instinct to survive, and transformed the indigenous people into automatons paralyzed by confusion and terror. Many did not understand what was happening to them as a consequence of the evil in concrete, specific men, but as a mythic cataclysm, a curse of the gods, a divine punishment from which there was no escape.

Though here, in Putumayo, Roger discovered in the documents he consulted concerning Amazonia that a few years earlier there had been an attempt at rebellion at the Abisinia station, where the Boras were. It was a subject no one wanted to talk about. All the Barbadians had avoided it. One night, a young Bora village chief, named Katenere, supported by a small group from his tribe, stole the rifles of the chiefs and “rationals,” killed Bartolomé Zumaeta (a relative of Pablo Zumaeta), who had raped Katenere’s wife when he was drunk, and disappeared into the jungle. The company put a price on his head. Several expeditions went out looking for him. For almost two years they couldn’t lay a hand on him. Finally, a party of hunters, led by an Indian informant, surrounded the hut where Katenere was hiding with his wife. The chief managed to escape, but his wife was captured. The manager, Vásquez, raped her himself, in public, and put her in the pillory without water or food. He kept her like that for several days. From time to time, he had her flogged. Finally, one night, the chief appeared. No doubt he had seen the torture of his wife from the undergrowth. He crossed the clearing, threw down the carbine he was carrying, and went to kneel in a submissive attitude beside the pillory where his wife was dying or already dead. Vásquez shouted at the “rationals” not to shoot him. He himself took out Katenere’s eyes with a wire. Then he had him burned alive, along with his wife, before the natives from the surrounding area who had been placed in a circle. Was this the way things had happened? The story had a melodramatic ending that Roger thought had probably been altered to bring it closer to the appetite for ferocity so prevalent in these hot places. But at least it had the symbol and the example: a native had rebelled, punished a torturer, and died a hero.

At the first light of dawn, he left the house where he was staying and went down the slope to the river. He swam naked after finding a small pool where he could resist the current. The cold water had the effect of a massage. When he dressed he felt refreshed and strengthened. On his return to La Chorrera he turned off to visit the sector where the Huitotos’ huts were located. The huts, scattered among plantings of yucca, corn, and plantains, were round, with partitions of tucuma wood held down with lianas and protected by roofs of woven yarina leaves that reached down to the ground. He saw skeletal women carrying infants—none of them responded to the gestures of greeting he made to them—but no men. When he returned to his cabin, an indigenous woman was putting the clothing he had given her to wash on the day of his arrival in his bedroom. He asked how much he owed her but the woman—young, with green and blue stripes on her face—looked at him, not understanding. He had Frederick Bishop ask her how much he owed. Bishop asked in Huitoto, but the woman seemed not to understand.

“You don’t owe her anything,” said Bishop. “Money doesn’t circulate here. Besides, she’s one of the women of the chief of La Chorrera, Víctor Macedo.”

“How many does he have?”

“Five, now,” the Barbadian explained. “When I worked here, he had at least seven. He’s changed them. That’s what everyone does.”

He laughed and made a joke: “In this climate, women get used up very fast. You have to replace them all the time, like clothing.” But Roger didn’t laugh.

He would remember the next two weeks they spent in La Chorrera, until the commission members moved on to the Occidente station, as the busiest, most intense of the journey. His entertainment consisted of swimming in the river, the fords, or the less torrential waterfalls, long walks in the forest, taking a good number of photographs, and, late at night, a game of bridge with his companions. The truth was that most of the day and evening he spent investigating, writing, questioning the local people, or exchanging impressions with his colleagues.

Contrary to their fears, Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy were not intimidated before the full commission or by the presence of Juan Tizón. They confirmed everything they had told Roger and expanded their testimonies, revealing new bloody deeds and abuse. At times, during the questioning, Roger saw one of the commissioners turn pale, as if he were going to faint.

Tizón remained silent, sitting behind them, not opening his mouth. He took notes in small notebooks. The first few days, following the interrogatories, he attempted to tone down and question the testimonies that referred to torture, murder, and mutilation. But after the third or fourth day, a transformation took place in him. He said nothing during meals, barely ate, and responded with monosyllables and murmurs when addressed. On the fifth day, as they were having a drink before dinner, he erupted. With reddened eyes he addressed all those present: “This goes beyond anything I could ever imagine. I swear on the souls of my sainted mother, my wife, my children, what I love most in the world, that all of this is an absolute surprise to me. The horror I feel is as great as yours. I’m sick at the things we’ve heard. It’s possible there are exaggerations in the accusations of these Barbadians, who might want to ingratiate themselves with you. But even so, there is no doubt that intolerable, monstrous crimes have been committed here that should be denounced and punished. I swear to you that …”

His voice broke and he looked for a chair. He sat for a long time with his head bowed, holding his glass. He stammered that Señor Arana could not suspect what was going on here and neither could his principal collaborators in Iquitos, Manaus, or London. He would be the first to demand that a remedy be found for all this. Roger, moved by the first part of what he said, thought that Tizón was less spontaneous now. And, human after all, he was thinking about his situation, his family, and his future. In any case, beginning that day, Juan Tizón seemed to stop being a high official in the Peruvian Amazon Company and become one more member of the commission. He collaborated with them zealously and diligently, often bringing them new data. And all the time he demanded that they take precautions. He had become distrustful, and peered around filled with suspicions. Because they knew what was occurring here, their lives were in danger, especially the general consul’s. He lived in a state of constant alarm. He feared the Barbadians would reveal to Víctor Macedo what they had confessed. If they did, one could not discount the likelihood that this individual, before he was taken to court or handed over to the police, would ambush them and say afterward they had perished at the hands of the savages.

The situation was overturned one dawn when Roger heard someone knocking at the door with his knuckles. It was still dark. He went to open the door and made out a silhouette that belonged not to Frederick Bishop but to Donal Francis, the Barbadian who had insisted that everything was normal here. He spoke in a very low, frightened voice. He had thought about it and now he wanted to tell him the truth. Roger asked him in. They talked, sitting on the floor because Donal was afraid that if they went out to the terrace, they might be overheard.

He assured him he had lied out of fear of Víctor Macedo, who had threatened him: if he told the English what was happening here, he would not set foot in Barbados again, and once they had left, after Macedo had cut off his testicles he would tie him naked to a tree so the ants would eat him. Roger calmed him down. He would be repatriated to Bridgetown, like the other Barbadians. But he did not want to hear this new confession in private. Francis ought to speak before the commissioners and Tizón.

He testified that same day, in the dining room, where they held their working sessions. He displayed a great deal of fear. His eyes spun, he bit his thick lips, and sometimes he didn’t find words. He spoke close to three hours. The most dramatic moment of his confession occurred when he said that a couple of months earlier, two Huitotos claimed to be sick to justify the ridiculously small amount of rubber they had harvested, and Víctor Macedo ordered him and a “boy” named Joaquín Piedra to tie their hands and feet, throw them in the river, and hold them underwater until they drowned. Then he had the “rationals” drag the bodies to the forest to be eaten by animals. Donal offered to take them to the spot where some limbs and bones of the two Huitotos could still be found.

On September 28, Roger and the members of the commission left La Chorrera in the Peruvian Amazon Company launch Veloz, headed for Occidente. They sailed up the Igara Paraná River for several hours, made stops at the rubber-storing posts of Victoria and Naimenes to eat something, slept in the launch, and the next day, after another three hours of navigating, anchored at the Occidente wharf. The station chief, Fidel Velarde, received them with his assistants Manuel Torrico, Rodríguez, and Acosta. They all have the faces and attitudes of thugs and outlaws, thought Roger. They were armed with pistols and Winchester carbines. Surely they were following instructions to be deferential to the new arrivals. Juan Tizón once again asked for their prudence. Under no circumstances should they reveal to Velarde and his “boys” the things they had found out.

Occidente was a smaller camp than La Chorrera, surrounded by a stockade of wooden shafts sharpened like spears. “Rationals” armed with carbines guarded the entrances.

“Why is the station so protected?” Roger asked Tizón. “Are they expecting an attack by Indians?”

“No, not by Indians. Though you never know whether another Katenere will appear one day. No, it’s the Colombians, who want these lands.”

Fidel Velarde had 530 natives at Occidente, most of whom were in the forest now, harvesting rubber. They brought in what they had collected every two weeks. Their wives and children stayed here, in a settlement that extended along the banks of the river outside the stockade. Velarde added that the Indians would offer the “visiting friends” a fiesta that evening.

He took them to the house where they would stay, a quadrangular, two-story construction on pilings, the door and windows covered with screens to keep out mosquitoes. In Occidente the smell of rubber coming out of the depositories and saturating the air was as strong as in La Chorrera. Roger was glad to discover that here he would sleep in a bed instead of a hammock. A cot, rather, with a mattress made of seeds, where he could at least lie flat. The hammock had worsened his muscular aches and his insomnia.

The fiesta took place early in the evening, in a clearing near the Huitoto settlement. A multitude of indigenous people had brought out tables, chairs, pots of food, and drinks for the strangers. They waited for them, in a circle, very serious. The sky was clear and there was no visible threat of rain, but the good weather and the sight of the Igara Paraná cutting through the plain of thick forests and zigzagging around them could not cheer Roger. He knew that what they would see would be sad and depressing. Three or four dozen Indians—the males very old or children, the females generally fairly young—some naked and others draped in the cushma or tunic Roger had seen many wearing in Iquitos, danced in a circle to the beat of the manguaré, drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks that the Huitotos struck with rubber-tipped sticks, drawing out hoarse, prolonged sounds that, it was said, carried messages and allowed them to communicate over great distances. The rows of dancers had rattles filled with seeds on their ankles and arms, which clattered when they made their arrhythmic hops. At the same time they sang some monotonous melodies touched by a bitterness that matched their serious, sullen, fearful, or indifferent faces.

Afterward, Roger asked his companions whether they had noticed the great number of Indians who had scars on their backs, buttocks, and legs. They disagreed among themselves over what percentage of the Huitotos who danced bore the marks of floggings. Roger said 80 percent, Fielgald and Folk thought no more than 60. But all of them agreed that what had affected them most deeply was an emaciated little boy, nothing but skin and bone, with burns all over his body and part of his face. They asked Frederick Bishop to find out if those marks were due to an accident or to punishments and torture.

At this station they intended to discover in detail how the system of exploitation operated. They began very early the next morning, after breakfast. As soon as they began to visit the rubber depositories, led by Fidel Velarde himself, they discovered by chance that the scales that weighed the rubber were rigged. It occurred to Seymour Bell to get on one of them because, since he was a hypochondriac, he believed he had lost weight. He was shocked. But how was it possible? He had lost more than twenty pounds! Still, he didn’t feel it in his body, otherwise his trousers would be falling down and his shirts would be slipping off. Roger weighed himself too and encouraged his colleagues and Juan Tizón to do the same. They were all many pounds under their normal weight. During lunch, Roger asked Tizón if he believed all the scales belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company in Putumayo had been tampered with like the one at Occidente to make the Indians believe they had collected less rubber than they actually had. Tizón, who had lost all his ability to dissimulate, only shrugged: “I don’t know, gentlemen. The only thing I know is that here everything is possible.”

Unlike La Chorrera, where they had hidden it in a warehouse, in Occidente the pillory was in the middle of the clearing around which the residences and depositories were located. Roger asked Fidel Velarde’s assistants to put him inside that instrument of torture. He wanted to know what a person felt in the narrow cage. Rodríguez and Acosta hesitated, but since Tizón authorized it, they told Roger to curl up and, pushing him with their hands, wedged him inside the pillory. It was impossible to close the wooden rods that held down legs and arms because his limbs were too stout, so they did no more than bring them together. But they could fasten the handles around his neck, which, without completely choking him, interfered with his breathing. He felt an intense pain in his body and it seemed impossible for a human being to endure that posture for hours, that pressure on back, stomach, chest, legs, neck, and arms. When he came out, before he had recovered the ability to move, he had to lean for a long time on the shoulder of Louis Barnes.

“For what kinds of crimes do you place Indians in the pillory?” he asked the chief of Occidente that night.

Fidel Velarde was a rather plump mestizo, with a walrus mustache and large, prominent eyes. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, high boots, and an ammunition belt.

“When they commit very serious crimes,” he explained, lingering over each phrase. “When they kill their children, disfigure their wives when they’re drunk, or commit robberies and won’t confess where they’ve hidden what they stole. We don’t use the pillory all the time. Just once in a while. In general the Indians here are well-behaved.”

He said this in a tone somewhere between cheerful and mocking, looking at the commissioners one by one with a fixed, disparaging gaze that seemed to be saying: I find myself obliged to say these things but please, don’t believe them. His attitude revealed so much arrogance and contempt for the rest of humanity that Roger tried to imagine the paralyzing fear this bully must inspire in the indigenous people, with his pistol at his waist, his carbine on his shoulder, his belt filled with bullets. A short while later, one of the five Barbadians from Occidente testified to the commission that on one drunken night he had seen Fidel Velarde and Alfredo Montt, who was then station chief at Último Retiro, wager on who could cut off the ear of a Huitoto being punished in the pillory more quickly and cleanly. Velarde succeeded in cutting off the Indian’s ear with a single slash of his machete, but Montt, who was a confirmed drunkard and whose hands trembled, instead of removing the other ear struck the middle of the Indian’s skull with his machete. When this session ended, Seymour Bell suffered a crisis. He confessed to his colleagues that he couldn’t bear any more. His voice was breaking and his eyes were red and filled with tears. They had already seen and heard enough to know that the most atrocious cruelty prevailed here. It made no sense to continue investigating this world of inhumanity and psychopathic cruelties. He proposed they conclude their trip and return to England immediately.

Roger said he would not oppose the others leaving, but he would remain in Putumayo, in accordance with the original plan, and visit a few more stations. He wanted their report to be extensive and well documented so it would have greater effect. He reminded them that all these crimes were being committed by a British company whose board of directors included highly respected Englishmen, and that the stockholders of the Peruvian Amazon Company were filling their pockets with what went on here. It was necessary to put an end to the offenses and sanction those responsible. To achieve this, their report had to be exhaustive and definitive. His words convinced the others, including the demoralized Seymour Bell.

To shake off the effects that the wager between Fidel Velarde and Alfredo Montt had on all of them, they decided to take a day off. The next morning, instead of continuing with interviews and inquiries, they went to swim in the river. They spent hours hunting butterflies with a net while Walter Folk explored the jungle searching for orchids. There was as great an abundance of butterflies and orchids in the area as mosquitoes and the bats that came at night, in silent flight, to bite dogs, chickens, and horses, sometimes infecting them with rabies so they had to be killed and burned to avoid an epidemic.

Roger and his companions were amazed at the variety, size, and beauty of the butterflies flying about in the vicinity of the river. They came in all shapes and colors, and their graceful fluttering and the splashes of light they gave off when they rested on a leaf or plant seemed to dazzle the air with delicate notes, a compensation for the moral ugliness they discovered at every turn, as if there were no end to wickedness, greed, and pain in this unfortunate land.

Walter Folk was surprised at the quantity of orchids hanging from the great trees, their elegant, exquisite colors illuminating everything around them. He did not cut them and did not allow any of his companions to do so either. He spent a long time observing them with a magnifying glass, making notes, and photographing them.

In Occidente Roger came to have a fairly complete idea of the system that made the Peruvian Amazon Company function. Perhaps at the beginning there had been some kind of agreement between the rubber barons and the tribes. But by now that was history, because the indigenous people did not want to go into the jungle to harvest rubber. For that reason, it all began with the correrías carried out by the chiefs and their “boys.” No wages were paid and the Indians never saw a cent. They received from the company store the tools for harvesting—knives to make incisions in the trees, tin cans for the latex, baskets for collecting strips or balls of rubber—in addition to domestic goods such as seeds, clothing, lamps, and some foodstuffs. Prices were determined by the company, so that the native was always in debt and would work the rest of his life to pay off what he owed. Since the chiefs did not receive salaries but commissions on the rubber harvested in each station, their demands to obtain the maximum were implacable. Each harvester went into the jungle for two weeks, leaving his wife and children as hostages. The chiefs and “rationals” made use of them as they chose, for domestic service or their sexual appetites. All of them had real harems—with many girls who had not reached puberty—and they exchanged them on a whim, even though sometimes, because of jealousy, there was a settling of accounts with bullets and stabbings. Every two weeks the harvesters returned to the station to bring in the rubber. This was weighed on the dishonest scales. If after three months they had not fulfilled thirty kilos, they received punishments that ranged from floggings to the pillory, cutting off ears and noses, or in extreme cases, the torture and killing of the wife, children, and the harvester himself. The corpses were not buried but dragged into the forest to be eaten by animals. Every three months the launches and steamboats of the company came for the rubber that, in the meantime, had been steamed, washed, and powdered. The boats sometimes took their cargo from Putumayo to Iquitos, and others went directly to Manaus for export to Europe and the United States.

Roger confirmed that a large number of “rationals” did no productive work. They were only jailers, torturers, and exploiters of the indigenous people. They spent the entire day lying down, smoking, drinking, amusing themselves, kicking a ball, telling one another jokes, or giving orders. All the work fell on the Indians: building houses, replacing roofs damaged by the rains, repairing the path down to the wharf, washing, cleaning, cooking, carrying things back and forth, and in the little free time they had left, tending to their crops, without which they would have had nothing to eat.

Roger understood his companions’ state of mind. If he, who after twenty years in Africa thought he had seen it all, was disturbed by what occurred here, his nerves shattered, experiencing moments of total discouragement, how must it be for those who had spent most of their lives in a civilized world, believing the rest of the earth was the same, composed of societies with laws, churches, police, customs, and a morality that kept human beings from behaving like beasts?

Roger wanted to remain in Putumayo so his report would be as complete as possible, but that was not the only reason. Another was his curiosity to meet the individual who, according to every testimony, was the paradigm of cruelty in this world: Armando Normand, the chief of Matanzas.

Since Iquitos he had heard anecdotes, comments, and allusions to this name, always associated with such wickedness and ignominy that he had obsessed about him to the point of having nightmares, from which he would wake bathed in sweat, his heart racing. He was certain many things he had heard from the Barbadians about Normand were exaggerations inflamed by the heated imagination so frequent in people in these areas. But even so, the fact that he had been able to generate this kind of mythology indicated he was someone who, though it seemed impossible, surpassed in savagery villains like Abelardo Agüero, Alfredo Montt, Fidel Velarde, Elías Martinengui, and others of their kind.

No one knew his nationality with any certainty—it was said he was Peruvian, Bolivian, or British—but everyone agreed he was not yet thirty and had studied in England. Juan Tizón had heard he had been certified as an accountant in an institute in London.

Apparently he was short, thin, and very ugly. According to the Barbadian Joshua Dyall, from his seemingly insignificant person radiated a “malignant force” that made anyone who approached him tremble, and his gaze, penetrating and icy, was like a snake’s. Dyall asserted that not only the Indians but also the “boys” and even the overseers felt insecure near him, because at any moment Armando Normand could order or carry out an act of chilling ferocity with no change in his contemptuous indifference toward everything around him. Dyall confessed to Roger and the commission that one day at the Matanzas station, Normand ordered him to kill five Andoques as punishment for not having met their rubber quotas. Dyall shot the first two, but the manager ordered that for the next two he should first crush their testicles with a stone for grinding yucca and then finish them off by garroting them. He had him strangle the last one with his bare hands. During the entire operation Normand sat on a tree trunk, smoking and watching, with no change in the indolent expression on his reddish face.

Seaford Greenwich, who had worked for some months with Armando Normand at Matanzas, recounted that the talk among the “rationals” at the station was the chief’s habit of placing chili peppers, either ground or in their skins, inside the sex of his young concubines to hear them shriek at the burning. According to Greenwich, only in this way could he become aroused and fuck them. At one time, the Barbadian added, instead of placing those being punished in the pillory, Normand would raise them with a chain tied to a tall tree and then release them to see how their heads split open and their bones broke or their teeth severed their tongues when they fell to the ground. Another overseer who had served under Normand assured the commission that even more than him the Andoque Indians feared his dog, a mastiff he had trained to sink its teeth into and tear off the flesh of any Indian he ordered it to attack.

Could all those monstrous acts be true? Roger told himself, sifting through his memory, that among the vast collection of villains he had known in the Congo, whom power and impunity had turned into monsters, none had reached the extremes of this individual. He was rather perversely curious to meet him, hear him speak, see him act, and learn his origins and what he could say about the crimes attributed to him.

From Occidente, Roger and his friends traveled, always on the launch Veloz, to the Último Retiro station. It was smaller than the previous ones and also had the look of a fort, with its palisade fence and armed guards around the handful of residences. The Indians seemed more primitive and taciturn than the Huitotos. They were half-naked, with loincloths that barely covered their sex. Here Roger saw for the first time two natives with the company’s brand on their buttocks: CA. They looked older than most of the others. He tried to talk to them but they didn’t understand Spanish or Portuguese, or Frederick Bishop’s Huitoto. Later, walking around Último Retiro, they discovered other branded Indians. From a station employee they learned that at least a third of the Indians living here carried the CA brand on their body. The practice had been suspended some time earlier, when the Peruvian Amazon Company agreed to the commission’s visit to Putumayo.

To reach Último Retiro from the river, one had to climb a slope muddied by the rain, one’s legs sinking into the mud to the knees. When Roger could remove his shoes and lie down on his cot, all his bones ached. His conjunctivitis had returned. The burning and tearing in one eye were so great that after putting in eyedrops, he bandaged it. He spent several days like that, looking like a pirate, with one eye bandaged and protected by a damp cloth. Since these precautions did not put an end to the inflammation and tearing, from then on and until the end of the journey, every moment of the day when he wasn’t working—there weren’t many—he hurried to lie down in his hammock or cot and remained there, both eyes covered with wet, lukewarm cloths. In this way his discomfort was eased. During these periods of rest and at night—he slept barely four or five hours—he tried to organize mentally the report he would write for the Foreign Office. The general outline was clear. First, a picture of conditions in Putumayo some twenty years earlier when the pioneers came and settled here, invading the tribes’ lands, and how, desperate at the lack of labor, they initiated the correrías with no fear of sanctions because there were no judges and no police. They were the only authority, sustained by firearms against which slings, spears, and blowguns proved futile.

He had to describe clearly the system of exploitation of rubber based on slave labor and the mistreatment of the indigenous people, which was inflamed by the greed of the station chiefs who, since they worked for a percentage of harvested rubber, made use of physical punishment, mutilations, and murders to increase the amount gathered. Impunity and absolute power had developed in these individuals sadistic tendencies that could be manifested freely here against natives deprived of all rights.

Would his report be useful? No doubt, at least the Peruvian Amazon Company would be sanctioned. The British government would ask the Peruvian government to bring those responsible for crimes to trial. Would President Leguía have the courage to do so? Tizón said he would, that just as in London, in Lima a scandal would erupt when people learned what went on here. Public opinion would demand punishment for the guilty. But Roger had his doubts. What could the Peruvian government do in Putumayo, where it didn’t have a single representative, where Arana’s company boasted, and with reason, that with its gangs of killers it was the power that maintained Peruvian sovereignty in these lands? Nothing would go beyond some rhetorical posturing. The martyrdom of the indigenous communities in Amazonia would continue until they were obliterated. This prospect depressed him. But instead of paralyzing him, it incited him to greater efforts, investigating, interviewing, and writing. He already had a pile of notebooks and cards written in his clear, careful hand.

From Último Retiro they went to Entre Ríos, in a journey by river and land that submerged them in thickets for an entire day. The idea delighted Roger: in this physical contact with wild nature he would relive the years of his youth, the long expeditions on the African continent. But even though in those twelve hours of going through the jungle, sinking at times to his waist in mud, slipping in underbrush that hid slopes, traveling certain sections in canoes that, powered by the Indians’ poles, slipped through extremely narrow channels covered by foliage that darkened the light of the sun, he sometimes felt the excitement and joy of long ago, the experience served above all to confirm the passage of time, the wearing away of his body. It was not only the pain in his arms, back, and legs, but also the unconquerable weariness against which he had to struggle, making heroic efforts to hide it from his companions. Louis Barnes and Seymour Bell were so exhausted that halfway through the journey each had to be carried in hammocks by four Indians of the twenty or so who escorted them. Roger observed, impressed, how these natives with such thin legs and skeletal bodies moved easily as they carried on their shoulders baggage and provisions, not eating or drinking for hours. During a rest break, Juan Tizón agreed to Roger’s request and ordered the distribution of tins of sardines among the Indians.

As they traveled they saw flocks of parrots and the playful monkeys with lively eyes called frailecillos, many kinds of birds, and iguanas with sleepy eyes whose wrinkled skins blended into the branches and trunks where they lay flat. And a Victoria regia as well, those enormous circular leaves that floated on lagoons like rafts.

They reached Entre Ríos late in the afternoon. The station was in an upheaval because a jaguar had eaten an Indian who had left the camp to give birth alone on the riverbank, as native women usually did. A hunting party led by the station chief had gone out to search for the jaguar, but they returned at nightfall without having found the animal. The chief of Entre Ríos was named Andrés O’Donnell. He was young and good-looking and said his father was Irish, but Roger, after questioning him, detected so much misinformation with respect to his forebears and Ireland that O’Donnell’s grandfather or great-grandfather was probably the first Irishman in his family to set foot on Peruvian soil. It pained him that a descendant of Irishmen was one of Arana’s lieutenants in Putumayo, though according to testimonies, he seemed less cruel than other chiefs: he had been seen whipping the indigenous people and stealing their wives and daughters for his private harem—he had seven women living with him and a multitude of children—but in his record he apparently hadn’t killed anyone with his own hands or ordered any murders. But in a prominent place in Entre Ríos the pillory was raised and all the “boys” and Barbadians carried whips at their waist (some used them as belts for their trousers). And a large number of Indian men and women showed scars on their backs, legs, and buttocks.

Even though his official mission required that he interview only British citizens who worked for Arana’s company, that is, Barbadians, after Occidente Roger also began to interview the “rationals” willing to answer his questions. In Entre Ríos this practice extended to the entire commission. On the days they were there, the chief himself and a good number of his “boys” testified, in addition to the three Barbadians who served Andrés O’Donnell as overseers.

The same thing almost always occurred. At first, they were all reticent and evasive and told brazen lies. But a slip, an involuntary imprudence that revealed the world of truths they were hiding was enough for them to suddenly begin to talk and tell more than what they were asked for, implicating themselves as proof of the veracity of what they were recounting. In spite of several attempts, Roger could not gather direct testimony from any Indian.

On October 16, 1910, when he and his colleagues on the commission, accompanied by Juan Tizón, three Barbadians, and some twenty Muinane Indian porters, led by their chief, walked through the forest along a narrow trail from Entre Ríos to the Matanzas station, Roger noted in his diary an idea that had been taking shape in his mind since he disembarked in Iquitos: “I have reached the absolute conviction that the only way the indigenous people of Putumayo can emerge from the miserable condition to which they have been reduced is by rising up in arms against their masters. It is an illusion devoid of all reality to believe, as Tizón does, that this situation will change when the Peruvian state comes here and there are authorities, judges, police to enforce the laws that have prohibited servitude and slavery in Peru since 1854. Will they enforce them as they do in Iquitos, where families buy girls and boys stolen by traffickers for twenty or thirty soles? Will those authorities, judges, and police enforce the laws when they receive their salaries from Casa Arana because the state has no money to pay them or thieves and bureaucrats steal the money on its way to them? In this society the state is an inseparable part of the machinery of exploitation and extermination. The indigenous people should not hope for anything from such institutions. If they want to be free they have to conquer their freedom with their arms and their courage. Like the Bora chief Katenere. But without sacrificing themselves for sentimental reasons, as he did. Fighting until the end.” Meanwhile, absorbed by these words he had etched in his diary, he walked at a good pace, cutting his way with a machete through lianas, thickets, trunks and branches that obstructed the path, when it occurred to him in the afternoon: “We Irish are like the Huitotos, the Boras, the Andoques, and the Muinanes of Putumayo. Colonized, exploited, and condemned to be that way forever if we continue trusting in British laws, institutions, and governments to attain our freedom. They will never give it to us. Why would the Empire that colonized us do that unless it felt an irresistible pressure that obliged it to do so? That pressure can come only from weapons.” This idea that in future days, weeks, months, and years he would keep polishing and reinforcing—that Ireland, like the Indians of Putumayo, if it wanted freedom, would have to fight to achieve it—so absorbed him during the eight hours the trek took that he even forgot to think that very shortly he would meet the chief of Matanzas: Armando Normand.

To reach the Matanzas Station, situated on the bank of the Ca-huinari River, a tributary of the Caquetá, they had to climb a steep slope that a heavy rain shortly before their arrival had transformed into a gully of mud. Only the Muinanes could climb it without falling. The rest slipped, rolled, got up covered with mud and bruises. In the clearing, also protected by a stockade of reeds, some Indian women poured pails of water on the travelers to remove the mud.

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.

Two days later his colleagues from the commission arrived in Entre Ríos. Roger was surprised to see Armando Normand with them, followed by his harem of young girls. Folk and Barnes informed him that even though the reason the Matanzas chief gave for coming with them was that he had to oversee personally the loading of the rubber in Puerto Peruano, he had done so because of how frightened he was with respect to his future. As soon as he learned of the accusations the Barbadians had made against him, he set in motion a campaign of bribes and threats to force them to retract what they had said. And he had been successful with some, such as Levine, who sent a letter to the commission (no doubt written by Normand himself) saying they denied all their statements, which they had been “tricked” into making, and they wanted to make it clear, in writing, that the Peruvian Amazon Company had never mistreated the indigenous people and that employees and porters worked in friendship for the greatness of Peru. Folk and Barnes thought Normand would try to bribe or intimidate Bishop, Sealy, and Lane, and perhaps Casement himself.

Very early the next morning, Armando Normand came to knock on Roger’s door and propose “a frank, friendly conversation.” The manager of Matanzas had lost his confidence and the arrogance with which he had previously addressed Roger. He seemed nervous and rubbed his hands and bit his lower lip as he spoke. They went to the rubber depository, in a clearing with brambles that the previous night’s storm had filled with puddles and frogs. A stench of latex came from the depository and the idea passed through Roger’s mind that the smell didn’t come from the rubber sausages stored in the large shed but from the small red-faced man who looked like a midget beside him.

Normand had prepared his speech carefully. The seven years he had spent in the jungle demanded huge privations for someone who had been educated in London. He didn’t want his life cut short by legal entanglements that would keep him from satisfying his longing to return to England. He swore on his honor he had no blood on his hands or his conscience. He was severe but just and was prepared to apply all the measures the commission and “Mr. Consul” might suggest to improve the operation of the enterprise.

“Put an end to correrías and the abduction of Indians,” Roger enumerated slowly, counting on his fingers, “get rid of the pillory and whips, don’t have the Indians work free of charge anymore, don’t allow the chiefs, overseers, and ‘boys’ to rape or steal the wives and daughters of the Indians, get rid of physical punishments, and pay reparations to the families of those who have been murdered, burned alive, or had their ears, noses, hands, and feet chopped off. Stop stealing from the porters with dishonest scales and inflated prices at the store to keep them forever in debt to the company.” All of that was just a beginning. Because many more reforms would be needed for the Peruvian Amazon Company to deserve to be a British company.

Armando Normand was livid and looked at him with incomprehension.

“Do you want the Peruvian Amazon Company to disappear, Mr. Casement?” he finally stammered.

“Exactly. And for all its killers and torturers, beginning with Señor Julio C. Arana and ending with you, to go on trial for your crimes and end your days in prison.”

He increased his pace and left the Matanzas chief with his face contorted, motionless where he stood, not knowing what to say. Roger immediately regretted having given in to the contempt this individual deserved. He had gained a mortal enemy who now might very well feel the temptation to kill him. He had warned him, and Normand, neither stupid nor lazy, would act accordingly. He had made a very serious mistake.

A few days later, Juan Tizón let them know that the Matanzas chief had asked the company for the money owed him, in cash, not in Peruvian soles but in pounds sterling. He would travel back to Iquitos in the Liberal along with the commission. What he was attempting was obvious: to weaken, with the help of friends and accomplices, the charges and accusations against him and to assure himself of an escape to another country—undoubtedly Brazil—where he would have a good amount of money waiting for him. The chances of his going to prison had been reduced. Tizón informed them that for the past five years, Normand had received 20 percent of the rubber harvested at Matanzas and a “bonus” of two hundred pounds sterling a year if the yield was higher than that of the previous year.

The subsequent days and weeks followed a suffocating routine. The interviews with Barbadians and “rationals” continued to reveal an impressive catalogue of atrocities. Roger felt his strength leaving him. Since he had begun to run a fever in the evenings, he was afraid it was malaria again and increased his dose of quinine when he went to bed. The fear that Armando Normand or any other station chief might destroy his notebooks with the transcriptions of the testimonies meant that in all the stations—Entre Ríos, Atenas, Sur, and La Chorrera—he carried those papers with him and would not allow anyone else to touch them. At night he placed them under the cot or hammock where he slept, a loaded revolver always within reach.

In La Chorrera, as they were packing their suitcases for the return to Iquitos, Roger saw about twenty Indians from the village of Naimenes come into camp. They were carrying rubber. The porters were young or adult men, except for a very skinny boy of nine or ten, who carried on his head a rubber sausage bigger than he was. Roger went with them to the scale where Víctor Macedo was accepting delivery. The little boy’s weighed fifty pounds and he, Omarino, only fifty-five. How could he walk all those miles through the jungle with that weight on his head? In spite of the scars on his back, he had lively, joyful eyes and smiled frequently. Roger had him take a tin of soup and another of sardines that he bought at the store. From that time on, Omarino did not leave his side. He accompanied him everywhere and was always ready to do any errand. One day Víctor Macedo said to him, pointing at the little boy:

“I see he’s become fond of you, Señor Casement. Why don’t you take him with you? He’s an orphan. I’ll give him to you.”

Afterward, Roger would think the phrase, “I’ll give him to you,” with which Víctor Macedo had wanted to ingratiate himself, said more than any other testimony: the station chief could “give” any Indian in his territory, since porters and harvesters belonged to him just like the trees, the houses, the rifles, and the rubber sausages. He asked Juan Tizón if there would be any problem with his taking Omarino to London—the Anti-Slavery Society would place him under its protection and be responsible for his education—and Tizón offered no objection.

Arédomi, an adolescent who belonged to the Andoque tribe, would join Omarino a few days later. He had come to La Chorrera from the Sur station, and the next day, in the river, as he swam, Roger saw him naked, splashing in the water with other Indians. He was a beautiful boy, with a well-proportioned, agile body, who moved with natural elegance. Roger thought Herbert Ward could make a beautiful sculpture of this adolescent, the symbol of Amazonian man stripped of his land, his body, and his beauty by the rubber barons. He distributed tins of food to the Andoques who were swimming. Arédomi kissed his hand in gratitude. He was displeased and, at the same time, moved. The boy followed him to his house, talking and gesturing energetically, but Roger didn’t understand him. He called Frederick Bishop who translated:

“He wants you to take him with you, wherever you’re going. He’ll serve you well.”

“Tell him I can’t, that I’m already taking Omarino with me.”

But Arédomi was obstinate. He stood motionless outside the cabin where Roger slept or followed him wherever he went, a few steps behind, a silent plea in his eyes. He decided to consult with the commission and Juan Tizón. Did they think it was all right if he took Arédomi to London along with Omarino? Perhaps the two boys would give greater persuasive strength to his report: both had flogging scars. Then, too, they were young enough to be educated and incorporated into a way of life that was not slavery.

On the eve of the departure of the Liberal, Carlos Miranda, chief of the Sur station, arrived in La Chorrera. He brought with him about one hundred natives with the rubber harvested in that region in the past three months. He was fat, in his forties, and very white. From his way of speaking and behaving, he seemed to have been better educated than other station chiefs. No doubt he came from a middle-class family. But his record was as bloodthirsty as those of his colleagues. Roger and the other members of the commission had heard several testimonies about the episode of the old Bora woman who, a few months earlier, in Sur, in an attack of despair or madness, suddenly began to shout, exhorting the Boras to fight and not allow themselves to be humiliated anymore or treated as slaves. Her shouting paralyzed the indigenous people around her with terror. Infuriated, Carlos Miranda attacked her with the machete he snatched from one of his “boys” and decapitated her. Brandishing her head, which drenched him in blood, he told the Indians this would happen to all of them if they didn’t do their work or imitated the old woman. The decapitator was a genial, cheerful man, talkative and easygoing, who tried to win over Roger and his colleagues by telling jokes and recounting anecdotes about the bizarre, picturesque individuals he had known in Putumayo.

On Wednesday, November 16, 1910, when he boarded the Liberal at La Chorrera’s wharf to begin the return to Iquitos, Roger opened his mouth and breathed deeply. He had an extraordinary feeling of relief. He thought this departure would cleanse his body and spirit of an oppressive anguish he hadn’t felt before, not even in the most difficult moments of his life in the Congo. In addition to Omarino and Arédomi, the Liberal carried eighteen Barbadians, five indigenous women who were their wives, and the children of John Brown, Allan Davis, James Mapp, Joshua Dyall, and Philip Bertie Lawrence.

The Barbadians being on the ship was the result of a difficult negotiation, filled with intrigues, concessions, and rectifications, with Juan Tizón, Víctor Macedo, the other members of the commission, and the Barbadians themselves. All of them, before testifying, had asked for guarantees, for they knew very well they were exposing themselves to reprisals from the chiefs their testimony could send to prison. Roger had pledged he would be responsible for taking them out of Putumayo alive.

But in the days before the Liberal arrived in La Chorrera, the company initiated a cordial offensive to retain the overseers from Barbados, assuring them they would not be victims of reprisals and promising them pay raises and better conditions if they would not leave their jobs. Víctor Macedo announced that whatever their decision, the Peruvian Amazon Company had decided to reduce by 25 percent what they owed the store for the purchase of medicine, clothing, household utensils, and food. All of them accepted the offer. And in less than twenty-four hours, the Barbadians announced to Roger that they would not leave with him but continue to work at the stations. Roger knew what that meant: pressure and bribery would make them retract their confessions as soon as he left and accuse him of having invented the testimonies or coerced the Barbadians with threats. He spoke to Juan Tizón, who reminded him that even though he was as affected as Roger by the things that were occurring and was determined to correct them, he was still one of the directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company and could not and should not influence the Barbadians to leave if they wanted to stay. One of the commissioners, Henry Fielgald, supported Tizón with the same arguments: he, too, worked in London with Mr. Arana, and even though he would demand deep reforms in the methods of working in Amazonia, he could not become the liquidator of the firm that employed him. Roger had the feeling the world was falling down around him.

But as in one of those rocambolesque changes of circumstance in French serials, that entire panorama changed radically when the Liberal arrived in La Chorrera at dusk on November 12. It brought correspondence and newspapers from Iquitos and Lima. The daily El Comercio, from the Peruvian capital, in a long article two months old, announced that the government of President Augusto B. Leguía, mindful of requests from Great Britain and the United States regarding alleged atrocities committed on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, had sent a leading magistrate of the Peruvian judiciary, Dr. Carlos A. Valcárcel, to Amazonia with special powers. His mission was to investigate and immediately initiate the proper judicial actions, taking police and military forces to Putumayo if he considered it necessary, so that those responsible for crimes would not escape justice.

This information exploded like a bomb among the employees of Casa Arana. Juan Tizón told Roger that Víctor Macedo, in great alarm, had summoned all the station chiefs, including the most distant ones, to a meeting in La Chorrera. Tizón gave the impression of a man torn by an insoluble contradiction. He was happy, for the honor of his country and because of an innate sense of justice, that the Peruvian government had finally decided to act. On the other hand, he did not hide the fact that this scandal could mean the ruin of the Peruvian Amazon Company and, consequently, of himself. One night, while drinking lukewarm whiskey, Tizón confessed to Roger that his entire inheritance, except for a house in Lima, was invested in company stocks.

The rumors, gossip, and fear generated by the news from Lima meant that once again the Barbadians changed their minds. Now they wanted to leave. They were afraid the Peruvian chiefs would try to avoid their responsibility in the torture and murder of Indians by blaming them, the “black foreigners,” and they wanted to leave Peru as soon as possible and return to Barbados. They were plagued by uncertainty and apprehension.

Roger, without saying anything about it to anyone, thought that if the eighteen Barbadians came to Iquitos with him, anything could happen. For example, the company would make them responsible for all the crimes and send them to prison, or try to bribe them to rectify their confessions and accuse Roger of having falsified them. The solution was for the Barbadians to disembark before reaching Iquitos at one of the ports of call in Brazilian territory and wait there for Roger to pick them up in the ship Atahualpa, on which he would sail from Iquitos to Europe, with a stop in Barbados. He confided his plan to Frederick Bishop, who agreed with it but told Roger the best thing would be not to communicate it to the Barbadians until the last minute.

There was a strange atmosphere on the wharf at La Chorrera when the Liberal left. None of the station chiefs came to say goodbye. It was said that several of them had decided to leave, heading for Brazil or Colombia. Juan Tizón, who would stay another month in Putumayo, embraced Roger and wished him luck. The commission members, who would also stay another week in Putumayo to do technical and administrative studies, took their leave at the foot of the stairs. They agreed to meet in London to read Roger’s report before he presented it to the Foreign Office.

On the first night of travel on the river, a full, reddish moon lit the sky. It was reflected in the dark water with a spatter of stars that looked like small luminous fish. Everything was warm, beautiful, and serene, except for the smell of rubber that was still there, as if it had entered one’s nostrils forever. For a long time Roger leaned on the rail at the stern, contemplating the spectacle, and suddenly realized his face was wet with tears. What miraculous peace, my God.

For the first days of the voyage, fatigue and anxiety kept him from reviewing his cards and notebooks and outlining his report. He slept little and had nightmares. He often got up at night and went out to the bridge if it was clear to look at the moon and stars. A Brazilian customs administrator was traveling on the boat. Roger asked him if the Barbadians could disembark at a Brazilian port and then travel to Manaus to wait for him so they could continue on together to Barbados. The official assured him there was absolutely no problem. Even so, Roger was still concerned. He was afraid something would happen that would save the Peruvian Amazon Company from all sanctions. After having seen so directly the fate of the Amazonian indigenous peoples, it was urgent for the entire world to know about it and do something to remedy the situation.

Another reason for his distress was Ireland. Ever since he had become convinced that only resolute action, an uprising, could save his country from “losing its soul” because of colonization, as had happened to the Huitotos, the Boras, and the other unfortunate peoples of Putumayo, he burned with impatience to throw himself body and soul into preparing the insurrection that would put an end to so many centuries of servitude in his country.

The day the Liberal crossed the Peruvian border—by now it was sailing on the Yavarí—and entered Brazil, the feeling of distrust and danger that had hounded him disappeared. But then they would return to the Amazon and sail up to Peruvian territory where, he was certain, he would again feel the anxiety that an unforeseen catastrophe would frustrate his mission and render the months spent in Putumayo useless.

On November 21, 1910, in the Brazilian port of La Esperanza on the Yavarí River, Roger had fourteen Barbadians, the wives of four of them, and four children disembark. The night before he had gathered them together to explain the risk they would run if they accompanied him to Iquitos. The company, in collusion with the judges and the police, would arrest them and hold them responsible for all the crimes, making them the object of pressures, insults, and extortion so they would retract the confessions that incriminated Casa Arana.

Fourteen Barbadians accepted his plan to get off in La Esperanza and take the first boat for Manaus, where, protected by the British consulate, they would wait for Roger to pick them up in the Atahualpa, of the Booth Line, which sailed the route Iquitos–Manaus–Pará. From this last city another ship would take them home. Roger said goodbye and left them with abundant provisions he had bought for them, certification that their passage to Manaus would be guaranteed by the British government, and a letter of introduction for the British consul in that city.

Continuing with him to Iquitos, in addition to Arédomi and Omarino, were Frederick Bishop, John Brown with his wife and son, Larry Clarke, and Philip Bertie Lawrence, also with two small children. These Barbadians had things to pick up and company checks to cash in the city.

Roger spent the four days it took to reach Iquitos working on his papers and preparing a memorandum for the Peruvian authorities.

On November 25 they landed in Iquitos. The British consul, Stirs, once again insisted that Roger stay in his house. And he accompanied him to a nearby rooming house where they found lodging for the Barbadians, Arédomi, and Omarino. Stirs was uneasy. All of Iquitos was very agitated at the news that Judge Valcárcel would arrive soon to investigate the accusations of Britain and the United States against Arana’s company. Not only the employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company were afraid but Iquitians in general, for everyone knew the life of the city depended on the company. There was great hostility toward Roger, and the consul advised him not to go out alone, since he could not discount the possibility of an attempt on his life.

When, after supper and the customary glass of port, Roger summarized for him what he had seen and heard in Putumayo, Stirs, who listened very seriously and silently, had only one question to ask:

“As terrible, then, as the Congo of Leopold the Second?”

“I’m afraid so, and perhaps worse,” Roger replied. “Though it seems obscene to establish hierarchies among crimes of this magnitude.”

In his absence, a new prefect had been appointed in Iquitos, a gentleman from Lima named Esteban Zapata. Unlike the previous one, he was not an employee of Julio C. Arana. From the time of his arrival he had maintained a certain distance from Pablo Zumaeta and the other company directors. He knew Roger was about to arrive and awaited him impatiently.

The interview with the prefect took place the next morning and lasted more than two hours. Esteban Zapata was young, very swarthy, and well mannered. In spite of the heat—he perspired constantly and wiped his face with a large purple handkerchief—he did not remove his woolen frock coat. He listened very attentively to Roger, showing astonishment at times, interrupting occasionally to ask for details, exclaiming frequently with indignation. (“How terrible! How awful!”) From time to time he offered him small glasses of cool water. Roger told him everything, in great detail, names, numbers, places, concentrating on facts and avoiding commentaries except at the end, when he concluded his account with these words:

“In short, Prefect, the accusations of the journalist Saldaña Roca and of Mr. Hardenburg were not exaggerated. On the contrary, everything the journal Truth has published in London, though it may seem false, is still not the entire truth.”

Zapata, with a disquiet in his voice that seemed sincere, said he felt ashamed for Peru. This occurred because the state had not reached those regions isolated from the law and lacking institutions. The government was determined to act. That is why he was here. That is why an upright judge like Dr. Valcárcel would arrive soon. President Leguía himself wanted to cleanse the honor of Peru, putting an end to these atrocious abuses. He had said as much, in those very words. His Majesty’s government would be able to confirm that the guilty would be punished and the indigenous people protected starting now. He asked if the report to his government would be public. When Roger replied that at first the report would be for the internal use of the British government, and undoubtedly would be sent to the Peruvian government so they could decide whether to publish it or not, the prefect sighed with relief:

“Thank goodness,” he exclaimed. “If all this is made public, it will do enormous harm to the image of our country in the world.”

Roger was about to tell him that what would harm Peru more would not be the report but the fact that what motivated it took place on Peruvian soil. On the other hand, the prefect wanted to know if the Barbadians who had come to Iquitos—Bishop, Brown, and Lawrence—would agree to confirm to him their testimonies regarding Putumayo. Roger assured him that tomorrow first thing he would send them to the Prefecture.

Stirs, who had served as interpreter in this conversation, left the interview crestfallen. Roger had noted that the consul added many phrases—at times real commentaries—to what Roger said in English, and that these interventions always tended to weaken the harshness of facts relating to the exploitation and suffering of the Indians. All of this increased his distrust of the consul, who, in spite of being here for several years and knowing very well what was going on, never had informed the Foreign Office about it. The reason was simple: Juan Tizón had disclosed that Stirs did business in Iquitos and for that reason also depended on Señor Arana’s company. No doubt his present concern was that the scandal might be prejudicial to him. The consul had a small soul and his values were subordinate to his greed.

In the days that followed, Roger tried to see Father Urrutia, but at the mission they told him the superior of the Augustinians was in Pebas, where the Yagua Indians lived—Roger had seen them on a stop the Liberal made there and been impressed by the tunics of spun fibers they used to cover their bodies—because he was going to open a school there.

And so in the days before he boarded the Atahualpa, which was still unloading in the port of Iquitos, Roger devoted himself to working on the report. Then, in the afternoons, he walked and, on a few occasions, went to the Cine Alhambra, on the Plaza de Armas in Iquito. It had existed for a few months, and silent films were shown there accompanied by an orchestra of three very out-of-tune musicians. The real spectacle for Roger was not the black-and-white figures on the screen but the fascination of the audience, Indians from the tribes and soldiers from the mountains in the local garrison who watched it all, amazed and disconcerted.

Another day he walked to Punchana along a trail that on his return had become a quagmire because of the rain. But the countryside was very beautiful. One afternoon he attempted to go to Quistococha by foot—he took Omarino and Arédomi with him—but an interminable downpour surprised them and they had to take shelter in the undergrowth. When the storm ended, the trail was so full of puddles and mud they had to hurry back to Iquitos.

The Atahualpa sailed for Manaus and Pará on December 6, 1910. Roger was in first class and Omarino, Arédomi, and the Barbadians in second class. When the ship, in the clear, hot morning, moved away from Iquitos and the people and houses on the banks grew smaller and smaller, Roger again felt in his bosom that feeling of freedom that comes with the disappearance of great danger. Not a physical danger, but a moral one. He had the feeling that if he had stayed longer in that terrible place, where so many people suffered so unjustly and cruelly, he too, for the simple fact of being white and European, would be contaminated and debased. He told himself that fortunately he would never set foot in these places again. The thought encouraged him and in part took him out of the despondency and lethargy that kept him from working with his old concentration and drive.

When, on December 10, the Atahualpa docked in the port of Manaus at dusk, Roger had already left behind his dejection and recovered his energy and capacity for work. The fourteen Barbadians were in the city. Most had decided not to return to Barbados but to accept contracts for work on the Madeira–Mamoré railroad, which offered good terms. The rest continued with him to Pará, where the boat docked on December 14. Here Roger found a ship going to Barbados and put the Barbadians and Omarino and Arédomi on board. He put the boys in Frederick Bishop’s care, asking him to take them to the Reverend Frederick Smith in Bridgetown with instructions to matriculate them in the Jesuit school where, before they continued on to London, they would receive a basic education that would prepare them to face life in the capital of the British Empire.

Then he looked for a ship to take him to Europe. He found the S.S. Ambrose of the Booth Line. Since it would not leave until December 17, he used the free days to visit the places he frequented when he was British consul in Pará: bars, restaurants, the botanical garden, the immense, chaotic, variegated market in the port. He did not feel nostalgia for Pará, for his stay here had not been happy, but he acknowledged the joy that emanated from the people, the grace of the women and idle boys who strolled and displayed themselves on the embankments along the river. Once again he told himself the Brazilians had a healthy, happy relationship with their bodies, very different from the Peruvians, for example, who, like the British, always seemed uncomfortable with their physical being. But here they showed it off boldly, especially if they felt young and attractive.

On the seventeenth he set sail on the S.S. Ambrose, and as he traveled he decided that since this ship would reach the French port of Cherbourg at the end of December, he would disembark there and take the train to Paris to spend the New Year with Herbert Ward and Sarita, his wife. He would return to London on the first working day next year. It would be purifying to spend a few days with these friends, a cultured couple, in their beautiful studio filled with sculptures and African mementos, talking of beautiful, elevated things, art, books, theater, music, the best produced by those contradictory human beings also capable of the extreme wickedness that reigned on Julio C. Arana’s rubber plantations in Putumayo.

XI

When the fat sheriff opened the door of his cell, came in, and without saying a word sat on a corner of the cot where he was lying, Roger was not surprised. Ever since the sheriff violated the rules and permitted him to take a shower, he had felt, without a word passing between them, a rapprochement with the jailer who, without realizing it, perhaps in spite of himself, had stopped hating him and holding him responsible for the death of his son in the trenches in France.

It was dusk, and the small cell was almost dark. Roger, from the cot, saw the very still shadow of the sheriff’s wide, cylindrical silhouette. He heard him panting deeply, as if exhausted.

“He had flat feet and could have avoided active duty,” he heard him say in a monotone, pierced by emotion. “At the first recruitment center, in Hastings, they rejected him when they examined his feet. But he didn’t accept that and went to another center. He wanted to go to war. Whoever heard of anything so crazy?”

“He loved his country, he was a patriot,” Roger said quietly. “You ought to be proud of your son, Sheriff.”

“What good does it do that he was a hero if he’s dead now,” the jailer replied in a lugubrious voice. “He was all I had in the world. Now, it’s as if I stopped living too. Sometimes I think I’ve turned into a ghost.”

In the shadowy cell it seemed to him the sheriff sobbed. But perhaps it was a false impression. Roger thought of the fifty-three volunteers of the Irish Brigade who remained in Germany, in the small military camp of Zossen, where Captain Robert Monteith had trained them in the use of rifles and machine guns, in tactics and military maneuvers, trying to keep their morale high in spite of an uncertain situation. And the questions he had asked himself a thousand times tormented him again. What did they think when he disappeared without saying goodbye, along with Captain Monteith and Sergeant Bailey? That they were traitors? That after entangling them in a rash adventure they had gone to fight in Ireland, leaving them surrounded by barbed wire, in the hands of the Germans, and hated by the Irish prisoners in Limburg, who considered them turncoats and disloyal to their comrades who had died in the trenches of Flanders?

Once again he told himself that his life had been a permanent contradiction, a series of confusions and cruel complications, where by chance or because of his own clumsiness, the truth of his intentions and actions was always obscured, distorted, turned into a lie. Those fifty-three pure, idealistic patriots, who’d had the courage to confront more than two thousand of their comrades in the camp at Limburg and join the Irish Brigade to fight “beside but not inside” the German army for the independence of Ireland, would never know about the titanic struggle Roger had waged with the German military high command to keep them from being dispatched to Ireland in the Aud along with the twenty thousand rifles the Germans were sending to the Volunteers for the Easter Rising.

“I am responsible for those fifty-three members of the brigade,” Roger told Captain Rudolf Nadolny, in charge of Irish affairs for the General Staff in Berlin. “I exhorted them to desert the British army. Under English law, they are traitors. They will be hanged immediately if the Royal Navy captures them, which will happen, irremediably, if the uprising takes place without the support of a German military force. I can’t send these compatriots to death and dishonor. They will not go to Ireland with the twenty thousand rifles.”

It hadn’t been easy. Captain Nadolny and the officers of the high command tried to force him to yield with blackmail.

“Very well, we will communicate immediately to the leaders of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin and the United States that in view of Mr. Roger Casement’s opposition to the uprising, the German government is suspending shipment of twenty thousand rifles and five million rounds.”

It was necessary to discuss, negotiate, explain, always remaining calm. Roger was not opposed to the rebellion, only to the Volunteers and the Citizen Army committing suicide, launching an attack against the British Empire without the Kaiser’s submarines, zeppelins, and assault troops to distract the British armed forces and prevent them from brutally crushing the rebels and setting back Irish independence for who knows how many years. The twenty thousand rifles were indispensable, of course. He would go to Ireland with the weapons and explain to Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and the other leaders of the Volunteers the reasons why, in his judgment, the uprising ought to be postponed.

Finally he succeeded. The ship with the weapons, the Aud, set sail, and Roger, Monteith, and Bailey set out in a submarine. But the fifty-three brigade members remained in Zossen, not understanding anything, no doubt wondering why those liars went to Ireland to fight and left them behind after training them for an action denied to them now with no explanation at all.

“When the baby was born, his mother left and abandoned us both,” the sheriff’s voice said suddenly and Roger gave a start on the cot. “I never heard from her again. So I had to become mother and father for the boy. Her name was Hortense and she was half crazy.”

The cell was now in total darkness. Roger could no longer see the jailer’s silhouette. His voice sounded very close and seemed more like an animal lament than a human expression.

“In the early years almost all my salary went to a woman who nursed him and took care of him,” the sheriff continued. “I spent all my free time with him. He was always an obedient, sweet child. Never one of those boys who run wild and steal and get drunk and drive their parents crazy. He was apprenticed to a tailor, who thought very highly of him. He might have had a career there if he hadn’t got it into his head to enlist, in spite of his flat feet.”

Roger didn’t know what to say. He felt very sorry for the sheriff’s suffering and would have liked to console him, but what words could alleviate the animal pain of this poor man? He would have liked to ask his name and the name of his dead son; in this way he would have felt closer to both of them, but he didn’t dare interrupt.

“I received two letters from him,” the sheriff went on. “The first, during his training. He told me he liked life in camp and when the war was over, perhaps he would stay in the army. His second letter was very different. The censor had crossed out many paragraphs in black ink. He didn’t complain, but there was a certain bitterness, even some fear, in what he wrote. I never heard from him again. Until a condolence letter came from the army, announcing his death. Saying he had died a hero in the battle of Loos. I never heard of that place. I looked for Loos on a map. It must be a tiny village.”

For the second time Roger heard that sob, similar to the screech of a bird. And he had the impression that the jailer’s shadow trembled.

What would happen now to those fifty-three compatriots of his? Would the German high command respect its agreements and permit the small Irish Brigade to remain together and separate in the camp at Zossen? It wasn’t certain. In his discussion with Captain Rudolf Nadolny in Berlin, Roger detected the contempt the German military had for a ridiculous contingent of some fifty men. How different their attitude had been at first when, letting themselves be persuaded by Roger’s enthusiasm, they supported his initiative to bring together all the Irish prisoners in Limburg Camp, supposing that once he spoke to them, hundreds would enroll in the Irish Brigade. What a failure, and what a disappointment! The most painful of his life. A failure that made him look ridiculous and shattered his patriotic dreams. Where was his mistake? Captain Robert Monteith believed his error was to speak to the twenty-two hundred prisoners together instead of in small groups. With twenty or thirty, a dialogue would have been possible, he could have responded to objections and clarified what they found confusing. But before a mass of men suffering from defeat and the humiliation of being prisoners, what could he expect? They understood only that Roger was asking them to ally themselves with yesterday’s and today’s enemies, which is why they reacted with so much belligerence. No doubt there were many ways to interpret their hostility. But no theory could erase the bitterness of finding himself insulted, called a traitor, yellow, a cockroach, a sellout by compatriots for whom he had sacrificed his time, his honor, and his future. He thought of Herbert Ward’s jokes when, mocking his nationalism, he exhorted him to return to reality and leave “the dream of the Celt” into which he had retreated.

On the eve of his departure from Germany on April 11, 1916, Roger wrote a letter to Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, reminding him of the terms of the agreement signed by him and the German government regarding the Irish Brigade. The accord stated that Brigade members could only be sent to fight for Ireland and in no case used as a mere support force to the German army in other theaters of war. By the same token, it stipulated that if hostilities did not conclude with a victory for Germany, the soldiers of the Irish Brigade were to be sent to the United States or a neutral country that would take them, and under no circumstances to Great Britain, where they would be summarily executed. Would the Germans fulfill these agreements? Uncertainty had returned over and over again since his capture. What if Captain Rudolf Nadolny had dissolved the Irish Brigade as soon as he, Monteith, and Bailey left for Ireland and returned its members to Limburg Camp? They would be insulted, discriminated against by the other Irish prisoners, and run the daily risk of being lynched.

“I would have liked them to return his remains to me.” The grieving voice of the sheriff startled him again. “To give him a religious burial, in Hastings, where he was born, like me, my father, and my grandfather. They told me no. That given the circumstances of war, the return of remains was impossible. Do you understand what they mean by ‘the circumstances of war’?”

Roger didn’t answer, because he realized the jailer wasn’t talking to him but to himself through him.

“I know very well what it means,” he continued. “That there’s nothing left of my poor son. That a grenade or a mortar pulverized him. In that damn place Loos. Or they put him in a common grave with other dead soldiers. I’ll never know where his grave is so I can bring him flowers and say a prayer for him once in a while.”

“The important thing isn’t his grave but his memory, Sheriff,” said Roger. “That’s what counts. All that matters to your son, where he is now, is knowing you remember him with so much love.”

The sheriff’s shadow had made a surprised movement when he heard Roger. Perhaps he had forgotten he was in the cell beside him.

“If I knew where his mother was, I’d have gone to see her, to give her the news, and the two of us could have cried for him together,” he said. “I don’t have any rancor toward Hortense for leaving me. I don’t even know if she’s still alive. She never bothered to ask about the son she abandoned. I told you before: she wasn’t a bad woman, just half crazy.”

Now Roger wondered once again, as he had been doing constantly, day and night, since the dawn of his arrival on the beach of Banna Strand, in Tralee Bay, when he had heard larks singing and had seen near the beach the first wild violets, why the hell there had been no Irish boat or pilot waiting for the freighter Aud, which was carrying rifles, machine guns, and ammunition for the Volunteers, or for the submarine carrying him, Monteith, and Bailey. What had happened? He read with his own eyes the peremptory letter from John Devoy to Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, who transmitted it to the German chancellery, advising that the uprising would take place between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and therefore the rifles had to arrive without fail at Fenit Pier, in Tralee Bay, on April 20. A pilot would be waiting there experienced in navigating the area, as well as rowboats and other vessels with Volunteers to unload the weapons. These instructions were reconfirmed in the same urgent terms on April 5 by Joseph Plunkett to the German chargé d’affaires in Berne, who retransmitted the message to the chancellery and the high command in Berlin: the weapons had to reach Tralee Bay at nightfall on the twentieth, not earlier or later. And that was the exact date when both the Aud and the U-19 submarine had reached the appointed place. What the devil had happened? Why was no one waiting for them? Why did the catastrophe occur that had buried him in prison and contributed to the failure of the uprising? Because according to the information his interrogators gave him, the Aud was caught by the Royal Navy in Irish waters long after the date agreed on for its landing—risking its safety, it had continued to wait for the Volunteers—which obliged the captain to sink his ship and send to the bottom of the ocean the twenty thousand rifles, ten machine guns, and five million rounds of ammunition that, perhaps, would have given another direction to the rebellion the British crushed with the ferocity that was to be expected.

In fact, Roger could imagine what had happened: nothing great or transcendental, one of those stupid trifles, slips, counter-orders, differences of opinion among the leaders of the High Council of the IRB, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and a few others. Some or perhaps all of them must have changed their minds about the best date for the Aud to reach Tralee Bay and sent the rectification to Berlin, not thinking the counterorder might be lost or arrive when the freighter and submarine were already out to sea and, due to the awful atmospheric conditions at the time, practically cut off from Germany. It must have been something like that. A minor confusion, an error in calculation, a piece of foolishness, and first-rate weapons were now at the bottom of the ocean instead of in the hands of the Volunteers killed during the week of street battles in Dublin.

He hadn’t been wrong to think it was a mistake to stage an armed rebellion without concurrent German military action, but that didn’t make him happy. He would have preferred to be wrong. And to have been there, with those lunatics, the hundred Volunteers who at dawn on April 24 captured the Post Office on Sackville Street, or with those who attempted to capture Dublin Castle, or with those who tried to blow up the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. A thousand times better to die like them, with a gun in his hand—a heroic, noble, romantic death—and not face the indignity of the gallows, like a murderer or rapist. No matter how impossible and unreal the plan of the Volunteers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Citizen Army might have been, it must have been beautiful and thrilling—no doubt everyone there cried and felt their hearts pounding—to hear Patrick Pearse read the manifesto that proclaimed the republic. Though only for an exceedingly brief parenthesis of seven days, “the dream of the Celt” became a reality: Ireland, emancipated from the British occupier, was an independent nation.

“He didn’t like me doing this work.” The sheriff’s anguished voice took him by surprise. “It embarrassed him that people in the neighborhood, in the tailor shop, knew his father was a prison employee. People suppose that because we rub elbows day and night with criminals, the guards become infected and turn into men outside the law too. Have you ever heard anything more unjust? As if somebody didn’t have to do this job for the good of society. I gave him the example of Mr. John Ellis, the hangman. He’s also a barber in his hometown, Rochdale, and nobody there speaks ill of him. On the contrary, all the residents think very highly of him. They wait in line to be served by him in his barbershop. I’m sure my son wouldn’t have let anyone speak ill of me in front of him. He not only had a good deal of respect for me. I know he loved me.”

Again Roger heard the stifled sob and felt the jailer’s trembling move the cot. Did it do him good to unburden himself in this way, or did it increase his pain? His monologue was a knife scraping a wound. He didn’t know what attitude to take: speak to him? Try to comfort him? Listen to him in silence?

“He never failed to give me something for my birthday,” he added. “He gave me all of his first salary at the tailor shop. I should have insisted he keep the money. What boy today shows so much respect for his father?”

The jailer sank back into silence and immobility. There weren’t many things Roger had been able to learn about the Rising: the taking of the Post Office, the failed attacks on Dublin Castle and the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. And the summary shootings of the principal leaders, among them his friend Sean McDermott, one of the first contemporary Irishmen to write prose and poetry in Gaelic. How many more had been shot? Did they execute them in the dungeons of Kilmainham Gaol? Or were they taken to Richmond Barracks? Alice told him that James Connolly, the great trade-union organizer, so badly wounded he couldn’t stand, had been placed before the firing squad sitting in a wheelchair. Barbarians! The fragmented facts about the Rising that Roger had learned from his interrogators, Basil Thomson and Captain Reginald Hall, from George Gavan Duffy, his sister Nina, and Alice Stopford Green, did not give him a clear idea of what had happened, only a sense of great disorder with blood, bombs, fires, and shooting. His interrogators kept referring to the news reaching London when there was still fighting in the streets of Dublin and the British Army was suppressing the last rebel strongholds. Fleeting anecdotes, casual phrases, threads he tried to situate in context using his fantasy and intuition. From the questions asked by Thomson and Hall during their interrogations, he discovered that the British government suspected he had come from Germany to lead the insurrection. That is how history was written! He had come to try to stop the Rising, and was transformed into its leader as a result of British error. For some time the government had attributed to him an influence among the supporters of independence that was far from reality. Perhaps that explained the campaigns of vilification in the British press when he was in Berlin, accusing him of selling himself to the Kaiser, of being a mercenary in addition to a traitor, and at the present time, the base acts attributed to him by the London papers. A campaign to plunge into ignominy the supreme leader he never was or wanted to be! That was history, a branch of fable-writing attempting to be science.

“Once he had a fever and the doctor at the infirmary said he was going to die.” The sheriff took up his monologue again. “But between Mrs. Cubert, the woman who nursed him, and me, we took care of him, kept him warm, and with love and patience saved his life. I spent many sleepless nights rubbing his whole body with camphorated alcohol. It did him good. It broke my heart to see him so small, shivering with cold. I hope he didn’t suffer. I mean over there, in the trenches, in that place, Loos. I hope his death was quick and he didn’t realize it. I hope God wasn’t cruel enough to inflict a long agony on him, letting him bleed to death slowly or choke on mustard gas. He always attended Sunday services and fulfilled his Christian obligations.”

“What was your son’s name, Sheriff?” Roger asked.

He thought the man gave another start in the darkness, as if he had just discovered again that he was there.

“His name was Alex Stacey,” he said at last. “Like my father. And like me.”

“I’m glad to know it,” said Roger. “When you know their names, you can imagine people better. Feel them, though you don’t know them. Alex Stacey is a nice-sounding name. It gives the idea of a good person.”

“Well-mannered and helpful,” the sheriff said softly. “Perhaps a little timid. Especially with women. I had observed him since he was a boy. With men he felt comfortable, he got along with no difficulty. But with women he became intimidated. He didn’t dare look them in the eye. And if they spoke to him, he began to stammer. That’s why I’m sure Alex died a virgin.”

He fell silent again and sank into his thoughts and total immobility. Poor boy! If what his father said was true, Alex Stacey died without having known the warmth of a woman. The warmth of a mother, a wife, a lover. Roger at least had known, though for a short time, the happiness of a beautiful, tender, delicate mother. He sighed. He hadn’t thought about her for some time, which never had happened before. If an afterlife existed, if the souls of the dead observed from eternity the fleeting life of the living, he was sure that Anne Jephson had been watching over him all this time, following his footsteps, suffering over and distressed by his misfortunes in Germany, sharing his disappointments, setbacks, and the awful feeling of having been wrong—in his ingenuous idealism, in the romantic propensity Herbert Ward so often mocked—of having idealized the Kaiser and the Germans too much, of having believed they would make the Irish cause their own and become loyal and enthusiastic allies of the dream of independence.

Yes, it was certain his mother had shared, during those five unspeakable days, his pain, vomiting, nausea, and cramps in the U-19 submarine that transported him, Monteith, and Bailey from the German port of Heligoland to the coast of Kerry. Never in his life had he felt so bad, physically and spiritually. His stomach could tolerate no food except for sips of hot coffee and small mouthfuls of bread. The captain of the U-19, Raimund Weisbach, had him take a swallow of brandy, but instead of stopping his nausea, it made him vomit bile. When the submarine navigated on the surface, at about twelve miles an hour, it moved the most and his seasickness was most devastating. When it submerged, it moved less but its speed diminished. Blankets and overcoats could not alleviate the cold that gnawed at his bones, nor the permanent feeling of claustrophobia that had been like an anticipation of what he would feel later, in Brixton Prison, in the Tower of London, in Pentonville Prison.

Undoubtedly because of his nausea and horrible malaise during the trip in the U-19, he left in one of his pockets the train ticket from Berlin to the German port of Wilhelmshaven. The police who arrested him in McKenna’s Fort discovered it when they searched him in the Tralee police station. The train ticket would be shown by the prosecutor at his trial as one of the proofs that he had come to Ireland from Germany, an enemy country. But even worse was that in another of his pockets, the police of the Royal Irish Constabulary found the paper with the secret code the German admiralty had given him so that in an emergency he could communicate with the Kaiser’s military commanders. How was it possible he hadn’t destroyed so compromising a document before leaving the U-19 and jumping into the boat that would take them to the beach? It was a question that festered in his mind like an infected wound. And yet, Roger remembered clearly that before taking their leave of the captain and crew of the U-19 submarine, on the insistence of Captain Robert Monteith, he and Sergeant Daniel Bailey had searched their pockets one last time to destroy any compromising object or document regarding their identity and origin. How could he have been careless to the extreme of overlooking the train ticket and secret code? He recalled the smile of satisfaction with which the prosecutor displayed the code during the trial. What damage did that information in the hands of British intelligence do to Germany?

What explained that very grave distraction was undoubtedly his calamitous physical and psychological state, devastated by seasickness, the deterioration of his health during his last months in Germany, and above all, the concerns and anguish that political events caused in him—from the failure of the Irish Brigade to his learning that the Volunteers and the IRB had decided the military uprising would take place during Easter Week even though there would be no military action by the Germans—which affected his lucidity and mental equilibrium, making him lose his reflexes, his ability to concentrate, his serenity. Were these the first symptoms of madness? It had happened to him before, in the Congo and the Amazonian jungle, faced with the spectacle of the mutilations and countless other tortures and atrocities to which the indigenous people were subjected by the rubber barons. On three or four occasions he had felt that his strength was leaving him, that he was dominated by a feeling of impotence in the face of the excess of evil he saw around him, the circle of cruelty and ignominy, so extensive, so overwhelming it seemed chimerical to confront and try to destroy it. Someone who feels so profound a demoralization can commit oversights as serious as the ones he had committed. These excuses relieved him for an instant or two; then, he rejected them, and the feelings of guilt and remorse became worse.

“I’ve thought about taking my own life.” Once again, the jailer’s voice caught him unawares. “Alex was my only reason for living. I have no other relatives. Or friends. Barely acquaintances. My life was my son. Why go on in this world without him?”

“I know that feeling, Sheriff,” murmured Roger. “And yet, in spite of everything, life also has beautiful things. You’ll find other reasons. You’re still a young man.”

“I’m forty-seven, though I look much older,” the jailer answered. “If I haven’t killed myself, it’s because my religion forbids suicide. But my doing it isn’t impossible. If I can’t overcome this sadness, this feeling of emptiness, that nothing matters now, I will. A man should live as long as he feels life is worth it. If not, not.”

He spoke without drama, with calm certainty. Again he fell silent and became still. Roger tried to listen. It seemed that from somewhere outside came reminiscences of a song, perhaps a choir. But the sound was so soft and distant he couldn’t decipher the words or the melody.

Why did the leaders of the Rising want to keep him from coming to Ireland? Why did they ask the German authorities that he remain in Berlin with the ridiculous title of “ambassador” from the Irish nationalist organizations? He had seen the letters, read and reread the sentences that concerned him. According to Captain Monteith, it was because the leaders of the Volunteers and the IRB knew Roger was opposed to a rebellion without a major German offensive to paralyze the British army and the Royal Navy. Why hadn’t they told him directly? Why had they sent him their decision through the German authorities? They were suspicious, perhaps. Did they believe he was no longer trustworthy? Perhaps they had credited the stupid, irrational rumors circulated by the British government accusing him of being a British spy. He hadn’t been at all concerned about the slander, had always supposed his friends and comrades would realize these were toxic operations by the British secret services to sow suspicion and division among the nationalists. Perhaps one, some of his comrades had let themselves be deceived by the colonizer’s tricks. Well, now they must be convinced that Roger Casement was still a fighter loyal to the cause of Irish independence. Could those who doubted his loyalty have been some of the men shot in Kilmainham Gaol? What did the understanding of the dead matter to him now?

He sensed the jailer standing and moving toward the cell door. He heard his slow, listless steps, as if he were dragging his feet. When he reached the door, he heard him say:

“What I’ve done is wrong. A violation of the rules. No one should say a word to you, least of all me. I came because I couldn’t stand it anymore. If I didn’t talk to someone my head or my heart would have exploded.”

“I’m glad you came, Sheriff,” Roger whispered. “In my situation, speaking to someone is a great relief. The only thing I regret is not being able to console you for the death of your son.”

The jailer grunted something that might have been a goodbye. He opened the cell door and left. From the outside he locked it again with the key. Once again the darkness was total. Roger lay down, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep, but he knew sleep wouldn’t come tonight either, and the hours until dawn would be very slow, an interminable wait.

He thought of the jailer’s words: “I’m sure Alex died a virgin.” Poor boy. To reach nineteen or twenty without having known the pleasure, the feverish swoon, the suspension of what was around you, the sensation of instantaneous eternity that barely lasted as long as the ejaculation and yet, so intense, so profound that it excited all the fibers of your body and made even the last vestige of your soul participate and come to life. He might have died a virgin too if instead of leaving for Africa when he turned twenty, he had remained in Liverpool working for the Elder Dempster Line. His timidity with women had been the same as—perhaps worse than—the shyness of the young man with flat feet, Alex Stacey. He remembered the jokes of his girl cousins, and especially of Gertrude, the beloved Gee, when they wanted to make him blush. They just had to talk about girls, to tell him, for example: “Have you seen how Dorothy looks at you?” “Do you realize that Malina always arranges to sit next to you at picnics?” “She likes you, cousin.” “Do you like her, too?” The discomfort these jests produced in him! He lost his confidence and began to stammer, to stutter, to talk nonsense, until Gee and her friends, overcome with laughter, calmed him down: “It was a joke, don’t be like that.”

Still, from the time he was very young he’d had a keen esthetic sense, known how to appreciate the beauty of bodies and faces, contemplating with delight and joy a harmonious silhouette, eyes that were lively and mischievous, a delicate waist, muscles that denoted the unconscious strength predatory animals exhibit in the wild. When did he become aware that the beauty that exalted him most, adding a flavor of uneasiness and alarm, the impression of committing a transgression, did not belong to girls but to boys? In Africa. Before he set foot on the African continent, his Puritan upbringing, the rigidly traditional and conservative customs of his paternal and maternal families, had repressed in embryo any hint of that kind of excitation, faithful to an environment in which the mere suspicion of sexual attraction between persons of the same sex was considered an abominable aberration, rightly condemned by law and religion as a crime and a sin without justification or extenuating circumstances. In Magherintemple, in Antrim, in the house of his great-uncle John, in Liverpool, in the house of his aunt and uncle and cousins, photography had been the pretext that allowed him to enjoy—only with his eyes and mind—those sleek, beautiful male bodies he felt attracted to, deceiving himself with the excuse that the attraction was purely esthetic.

Africa, that horrible but beautiful continent with its enormous suffering, was also the land of freedom, where human beings could be mistreated in the most iniquitous way but, at the same time, show their passions, fantasies, desires, instincts, and dreams without the restraints and prejudices that stifled pleasure in Great Britain. He remembered an afternoon of smothering heat and high sun in Boma, when it wasn’t even a village but a tiny settlement. Suffocating and feeling that his body was on fire, he had gone to swim in the stream on the outskirts that, shortly before rushing into the waters of the Congo River, formed small lagoons and murmuring falls among the rocks in a spot with very tall mango trees, coconut palms, baobabs, and giant ferns. Two young Bakongos were swimming there, naked as he was. Though they didn’t speak English, they answered his greeting with smiles. They seemed to be swimming, but Roger soon realized they were fishing with their bare hands. Their excitement and laughter were due to the difficulty they had holding on to the slippery little fish that escaped between their fingers. One of the two boys was very beautiful. He had a long, blue-black, well-proportioned body, deep eyes with a lively light in them, and he moved in the water like a fish. With his movements, the muscles in his arms, back and thighs became prominent, gleaming with the drops of water clinging to his skin. On his dark face, with its geometric tattoos and flashing glances, his very white teeth stood out. When they finally caught a fish, with a great clamor, the other boy left the stream and went to the bank, where, it seemed to Roger, he began to cut and clean the fish and prepare a fire. The one who had stayed in the water looked into his eyes and smiled. Roger, feeling a kind of fever, swam toward him, smiling as well. When he reached his side, he didn’t know what to do. He felt shame, discomfort, and at the same time, unlimited joy.

“Too bad you don’t understand me,” he heard himself say softly. “I would have liked to take photographs of you. Talk with you. Become your friend.”

And then he felt the boy impelling himself forward with his feet and arms, shortening the distance that separated them. Now he was so close they were almost touching. And then Roger felt someone else’s hands searching out his belly, touching and caressing his sex, which had been erect for a while. In the darkness of his cell, he sighed with desire and anguish. Closing his eyes, he tried to revive that scene from so many years ago: the surprise, the indescribable excitement that nonetheless did not attenuate his misgivings and fear, and his body embracing the boy’s, whose stiff penis he could also feel rubbing against his legs and belly.

It was the first time Roger made love, if you can call it making love when he became excited and ejaculated in the water against the body of the boy who masturbated him and undoubtedly also ejaculated, though Roger didn’t notice that. When he came out of the water and dressed, the two Bakongos invited him to a few mouthfuls of the fish they had smoked over a small fire on the edge of the pool the stream had formed.

What shame he felt afterward. All the rest of the day he was in a daze, sunk in remorse that mixed with sparks of joy, the awareness of having gone past the limits of a prison and achieving a freedom he had always desired in secret and never dared look for. Was he remorseful, did he intend to make amends? Yes, yes. He did. He promised himself, for the sake of his honor, the memory of his mother, his religion, that it would not be repeated, knowing very well he was lying to himself, and now that he had tasted the forbidden fruit, felt how his entire being was transformed into a dizzying blazing torch, he could not avoid its being repeated. That was the only, or, in any case, one of the few times in which pleasure had not cost him money. Had the fact of paying his lovers of a few minutes or hours freed him very quickly from the pangs of conscience that at first hounded him after those adventures? Perhaps. As if, being converted into a commercial transaction—you give me your mouth and penis and I give you my tongue, my asshole, and several pounds—those rapid encounters in parks, dark corners, public bathrooms, stations, foul hotels, or in the middle of the street—like dogs, he thought—with men with whom he often could communicate only by gestures and looks because they did not speak his language, stripped those acts of all moral significance and turned them into a pure exchange, as neutral as buying ice cream or a pack of cigarettes. It was pleasure, not love. He had learned to enjoy but not to love or be loved. Occasionally in Africa, Brazil, Iquitos, London, Belfast, or Dublin, after a particularly intense encounter, some feeling had been added to the adventure and he had told himself: I’m in love. False: he never was. That didn’t last. Not even with Eivind Adler Christensen, for whom he had developed affection, but not that of a lover, perhaps an older brother or father. Miserable wretch. In this area, too, his life had been a complete failure. Many lovers for a price—dozens, perhaps hundreds—and not a single loving relationship. Pure sex, hurried and animal.

For that reason, when he made a reckoning of his sexual and emotional life, Roger told himself it had been belated and austere, made up of sporadic, always hasty adventures, as transient, as lacking in consequences, as the one in the stream with waterfalls and pools in the outskirts of what was still an encampment half lost in a place on the Lower Congo called Boma.

He was seized by the profound sadness that had almost always followed his furtive amorous encounters, generally outdoors, like the first one, with men and boys who were often foreigners whose names he did not know or forgot as soon as he learned them. They were ephemeral moments of pleasure, nothing that could compare with the stable relationship, lasting over months and years, in which added to passion were understanding, complicity, friendship, dialogue, solidarity, the relationship between Herbert and Sarita Ward that he had always envied. It was another of the great voids, the great nostalgias, of his life.

He saw that there where the jamb of his cell door was supposed to be, a ray of light had appeared.

XII

I’ll leave my bones on that damn trip, Roger thought when Chancellor Sir Edward Grey told him that in view of the contradictory news coming from Peru, the only way for the British government to know what it could believe with regard to what was occurring there was for Casement to go back to Iquitos and see on the ground whether the Peruvian government had done anything to end the iniquities in Putumayo or was using delaying tactics because it would not, or could not, confront Julio C. Arana.

Roger’s health was going from bad to worse. Since his return from Iquitos, even during the few days at the end of the year that he spent in Paris with the Wards, he was again tormented by conjunctivitis and a return of malaria. And he was bothered again by hemorrhoids, though without the hemorrhages he’d had earlier. As soon as he returned to London, early in January 1911, he went to see doctors. The two specialists he consulted decided his condition was the result of the immense fatigue and nervous tension of his time in Amazonia. He needed rest, a very quiet vacation.

But he couldn’t take one. Writing the report that the British government urgently required, and many meetings at the ministry when he had to inform them of what he had seen and heard in Amazonia, as well as visits to the Anti-Slavery Society, took up a great deal of time. He also had to meet with the British and Peruvian directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company, who, during their first interview, after listening to his impressions of Putumayo for almost two hours, were left paralyzed. Their long faces, with partially opened mouths, looked at him in disbelief and horror, as if the floor had begun to open under their feet and the ceiling to fall in on their heads. They didn’t know what to say. They took their leave without formulating a single question for him.

Julio C. Arana attended the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company. It was the first and last time Roger saw him in person. He had heard so much about him, heard so many different people deify him as they tend to do with religious saints or political leaders (never with businessmen) or attribute horrendous cruelties and crimes to him—monumental cynicism, sadism, greed, avarice, disloyalty, swindles, and all kinds of knavery—that he sat observing him for a long while, like an entomologist with a mysterious insect that has not yet been classified.

It was said he understood English but never spoke it because of timidity or vanity. He had an interpreter beside him who translated everything into his ear in a very quiet voice. He was a fairly short man, dark, with mestizo features and an Asian trace in his slanted eyes, a very broad forehead, and thinning hair, carefully combed with a center part. He had a small mustache and goatee, recently combed, and he smelled of cologne. The legend of his mania regarding hygiene and attire must be true. He dressed impeccably, wearing a suit of fine wool that may have been cut on Savile Row. He didn’t open his mouth while the other directors interrogated Roger with a thousand questions undoubtedly prepared for them by Arana’s lawyers. They attempted to make him fall into contradictions and insinuated the mistakes, exaggerations, susceptibilities, and scruples of an urbane, civilized European who is disconcerted by the primitive world.

As he responded and added testimonies and precise facts that made what he had told them at the first meeting even worse, Roger did not stop glancing at Arana. As still as an idol, he didn’t move in his seat and didn’t even blink. His expression was indecipherable. There was something inflexible in his hard, cold gaze. It reminded Roger of the eyes, empty of humanity, of the station chiefs on the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the eyes of men who had lost (if they ever possessed it) the capacity to discriminate between good and evil, kindness and wickedness, the human and the inhuman.

This small, elegant, slightly plump man, then, was master of an empire the size of a European country, the hated, adulated master of the lives and property of tens of thousands of people, a man who in that miserably poor world of Amazonia had accumulated a fortune comparable to that of the great potentates of Europe. He had begun as a poor boy in the small forsaken village Rioja must have been, in the high Peruvian jungle, selling from door to door straw hats that his family had woven. Little by little, compensating for his lack of education—only a few years of primary instruction—with a superhuman capacity for work, a brilliant instinct for business, and an absolute lack of scruples, he climbed the social pyramid. From a traveling peddler of hats in vast Amazonia, he became a financial backer of the wretched rubber workers who ventured at their own risk into the jungle, whom he supplied with machetes, carbines, fishing nets, knives, cans for the rubber, canned goods, yucca flour, and domestic utensils in exchange for part of the rubber they harvested, which he took care of selling in Iquitos and Manaus to export companies, until, with the money he had earned, he could move from supplier and agent to producer and exporter. At first he became partners with Colombian rubber planters who, less intelligent or diligent than he, or less lacking in morality, eventually sold their land, depositories, and indigenous laborers to him at a loss, and at times went to work for him. Distrustful, he installed his brothers and brothers-in-law in key positions in the enterprise, which, in spite of its vast size and having been registered on the London stock market since 1908, continued to function in practice like a family business. How great was his fortune? The legend undoubtedly exaggerated the reality. But in London, the Peruvian Amazon Company had this valuable building in the heart of the City, and Arana’s mansion on Kensington Road was in no way inferior to the palaces of princes and bankers that surrounded it. His house in Geneva and his elegant summer home in Biarritz were furnished by fashionable decorators and displayed paintings and luxurious objects. But it was said that he led an austere life, didn’t drink or gamble or have lovers, and dedicated all his free time to his wife. He had loved her since he was a boy—she was also from Rioja—but Eleonora Zumaeta said yes only after many years, when he was already wealthy and powerful and she was a schoolteacher in the small village where she had been born.

When the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company had ended, Julio C. Arana guaranteed through his interpreter that his company would do everything necessary to correct immediately any deficiency or malfunction on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, for it was the policy of his firm to always act within the law and altruistic morality of the British Empire. Arana took his leave of the consul with a nod, not offering his hand.

Writing the Report on Putumayo took Roger a month and a half. He began writing it in a room at the Foreign Office, assisted by a typist, but then he preferred to work in his Philbeach Gardens apartment, in Earls Court, next to the beautiful little church of St. Cuthbert and St. Matthias, where he sometimes went to listen to the magnificent organist. And since even there he was interrupted by politicians and members of humanitarian and antislavery organizations and people from the press, for the rumor that his Report on Putumayo would be as devastating as the one he had written about the Congo circulated throughout London and gave rise to conjectures and talk in the London gossip columns and rumor mills, he requested authorization from the Foreign Office to travel to Ireland. There, in a room in Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street in Dublin, he completed his work early in March 1911. Congratulations from his superiors and colleagues immediately poured in. Sir Edward Grey himself summoned him to his office to praise his report and at the same time suggest a few minor corrections. The text was immediately sent to the government of the United States so that London and Washington could put pressure on President Leguía, demanding in the name of the civilized world that he put an end to the slavery, torture, abductions, rapes, and annihilation of the indigenous communities, and take those incriminated to court.

Roger could not yet take the rest prescribed by his physicians, which he needed so much. He had to meet several times with committees from the government, Parliament, and the Anti-Slavery Society that were studying the most practical ways for public and private institutions to alleviate the situation of the Amazonian natives. At his suggestion, one of their first initiatives was to pay for the establishment of a religious mission in Putumayo, something that Arana’s company had always prevented but now was pledged to facilitate.

Finally, in June 1911, he was able to leave for a vacation in Ireland. He was there when he received a personal letter from Sir Edward Grey. The chancellor informed him that on his recommendation, His Majesty George V had decided to knight him for exemplary service to the United Kingdom in the Congo and Amazonia.

While relatives and friends showered him with congratulations, Roger, who almost burst into laughter the first few times he heard himself called Sir Roger, was filled with doubts. How could he accept a title granted by a regime toward which, in the depths of his heart, he felt enmity, the same regime that had colonized his country? On the other hand, didn’t he serve this king and this government as a diplomat? He had never been so intensely aware of the double life he had lived for years, working on one hand with discipline and efficiency in the service of the British Empire, and on the other devoted to the cause of the emancipation of Ireland and becoming increasingly drawn not to the moderates led by John Redmond, who aspired to Home Rule, but to the radicals of the IRB, secretly led by Tom Clarke, whose goal was independence through armed action. Consumed by these vacillations, he chose to thank Sir Edward Grey in a courteous letter for the honor he had conferred on him. The news spread throughout the press and helped to increase his prestige.

The demands made to the Peruvian government by Britain and the United States that the principal criminals cited in the Report—Fidel Velarde, Alfredo Montt, Augusto Jiménez, Armando Normand, José Inocente Fonseca, Abelardo Agüero, Elías Martinengui, and Aurelio Rodríguez—be arrested and tried seemed at first to bear fruit. The chargé d’affaires for the United Kingdom in Lima, Mr. Lucien Gerome, cabled the Foreign Office that the eleven principal employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company had been dismissed. Judge Carlos Valcárcel, sent from Lima, organized an expedition as soon as he arrived in Iquitos to investigate the rubber plantations in Putumayo, but he couldn’t join it because he fell ill and had to travel to the United States for surgery. He put an energetic, respectable person at the head of the expedition: Rómulo Paredes, editor of the newspaper El Oriente, who traveled to Putumayo with a doctor, two interpreters, and an escort of nine soldiers. The commission visited all the rubber stations of the Peruvian Amazon Company and had just gone back to Iquitos, where a recuperated Judge Valcárcel had also returned. The Peruvian government had promised Mr. Gerome that as soon as it received the report from Paredes and Valcárcel, it would take action.

However, a short while later, Gerome again reported that Leguía’s government was distressed to inform him that most of the criminals whose arrests it had ordered had fled to Brazil. The others perhaps were hiding in the jungle or had entered Colombian territory clandestinely. The United States and Great Britain attempted to have the Brazilian government extradite the fugitives to Peru to be brought to justice. But the chancellor of Brazil, the Baron de Río Branco, replied to both governments that there was no extradition treaty between Peru and Brazil and therefore those persons could not be returned without provoking a delicate problem in international law.

Days later, the British chargé d’affaires reported that in a private interview, the Peruvian minister of foreign relations had admitted, unofficially, that President Leguía was in an impossible situation. Due to its presence in Putumayo and the security forces it had to protect its installations, Arana’s company was the only restraint that kept the Colombians, who had been reinforcing their border garrisons, from invading the region. The United States and Great Britain were asking for something absurd: closing or harassing the Peruvian Amazon Company meant handing to Colombia the immense territory it coveted, pure and simple. Neither Leguía nor any other Peruvian leader could do such a thing without committing suicide. And Peru lacked the resources to establish in the remote wilds of Putumayo a military garrison strong enough to protect national sovereignty. Lucien Gerome added that for all these reasons, it was not possible to expect the Peruvian government to do anything efficacious now except make statements and gestures lacking in substance.

This was the reason the Foreign Office decided, before His Majesty’s government made his Report on Putumayo public and asked the Western nations for sanctions against Peru, that Roger Casement should return to the territory and confirm in Amazonia, with his own eyes, whether any reforms had been realized, a judicial process was in progress, and the legal action initiated by Dr. Valcárcel was genuine. Sir Edward Grey’s insistence meant that Roger found himself obliged to agree, telling himself something that in the next few months he would have many occasions to repeat, I’ll leave my bones on that damned trip.

He was preparing for his departure when Omarino and Arédomi arrived in London. In the five months they had spent in his care in Barbados, Father Smith had given them English lessons and notions of reading and writing, and had accustomed them to dressing in the Western manner. But Roger found two young boys whom civilization, in spite of giving them enough to eat and not hitting or flogging them, had saddened and dulled. They always seemed fearful that the people around them, subjecting them to inexhaustible scrutiny, looking at them from head to toe, touching them, passing their hands over their skin as if they thought they were dirty, asking them questions they didn’t understand and didn’t know how to answer, would hurt them. Roger took them to the zoo, to have ice cream in Hyde Park, to visit his sister Nina, his cousin Gertrude, and for an evening with intellectuals and artists at the house of Alice Stopford Green. Everyone treated them with affection, but the curiosity with which they were examined, above all when they had to take off their shirts and show the scars on their backs and buttocks, disturbed them. At times, Roger discovered the boys’ eyes filled with tears. He had planned to send them to be educated in Ireland, on the outskirts of Dublin, at St. Enda’s bilingual school directed by Patrick Pearse, whom he knew well. He wrote to him about it, telling him the origin of both boys. Roger had given a talk at St. Enda’s on Africa and supported with financial donations Patrick Pearse’s efforts, both in the Gaelic League and its publications and in this school, to promote the diffusion of the ancient Irish language. Pearse, poet, writer, militant Catholic, pedagogue, and radical nationalist, agreed to take them both, even offering a discount on the matriculation and room and board at St. Enda’s. But when he received Pearse’s answer, Roger had already decided to consent to what Omarino and Arédomi pleaded for every day: to return them to Amazonia. Both were profoundly unhappy in England, where they felt they had been turned into human anomalies, objects on display that surprised, amused, moved, and at times frightened people who would never treat them as equals but always as exotic outsiders.

On the trip back to Iquitos, Roger would think a great deal about this lesson reality had given him on how paradoxical and ungraspable the human soul was. Both boys had wanted to escape the Amazonian hell where they were mistreated and made to work like animals and given barely anything to eat. He had made efforts and spent a good amount of his scant funds to pay for their passages to Europe and support them for the past six months, thinking that in this way he was saving them, giving them access to a decent life. Yet here, though for different reasons, they were as far from happiness or, at least, a tolerable existence, as they had been in Putumayo. Though they weren’t beaten and instead were treated with affection, they felt alienated, alone, and aware they would never form part of this world.

Shortly before Roger left for the Amazon, the Foreign Office, following his advice, appointed a new consul, George Michell, in Iquitos. It was a magnificent choice. Roger had met him in the Congo. Michell was persistent and worked enthusiastically in the campaign to denounce the crimes committed under the regime of Leopold II. With regard to colonization, he held the same position as Roger. In the event, he would not hesitate to confront Casa Arana. They had two long conversations and planned a close collaboration.

On August 16, 1911, Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Southampton on the Magdalena, bound for Barbados. They reached the island twelve days later. As soon as the ship began to cut through the silvery blue water of the Caribbean, Roger felt in his blood that his sex, asleep in these recent months of diseases, preoccupations, and great physical and mental effort, was waking again and filling his mind with fantasies and desires. In his diary he summarized his state of mind with three words: “I burn again.”

As soon as they disembarked, he went to thank Father Smith for all he had done for the two boys. He was moved to see how Omarino and Arédomi, so sparing in the display of their feelings in London, embraced and patted the cleric with great familiarity. Father Smith took them to visit the Ursuline convent. In that serene cloister with carob trees and the purple blossoms of bougainvillea, where noise from the street did not reach and time seemed suspended, Roger moved away from the others and sat down on a bench. He was observing a line of ants carrying a leaf in the air, like the men carrying the platform of the Virgin in processions in Brazil, when he remembered: today was his birthday. Forty-seven! He couldn’t say he was an old man. Many men and women his age were in their prime physically and psychologically, with energy, desires, and projects. But he felt old, with the unpleasant feeling of having entered the final stage of his life. Once, in Africa, with Herbert Ward, they had imagined how their final years would be. The sculptor envisioned a Mediterranean old age, in Provence or Tuscany, in a house in the countryside. He would have a huge studio and many cats, dogs, ducks, and chickens, and on Sundays he would cook dense, spiced dishes such as bouillabaisse for a long line of relatives. Roger, on the other hand, startled, declared: “I won’t reach old age, I’m certain.” It had been a presentiment. He vividly recalled that premonition and felt it again as true: he would never be an old man.

Father Smith agreed to put up Omarino and Arédomi for the week they would spend in Bridgetown. The day following his arrival, Roger went to a public bath he had frequented the last time he had been on the island. As he expected, he saw young, athletic, statuesque men, for here, just as in Brazil, people were not ashamed of their bodies. Men and women cultivated their bodies and displayed them without shame. A very young boy, an adolescent of fifteen or sixteen, disquieted him. He had the pallor frequent in mulattoes, smooth, gleaming skin, large, audacious green eyes, and from his tight swimsuit emerged hairless, limber thighs that caused the beginnings of vertigo in Roger. Experience had sharpened the intuition that allowed him to know very quickly, through signs imperceptible to anyone else—the hint of a smile, a light in the eyes, an inviting movement of the hand or body—whether a boy understood what he wanted and was willing to grant it or, at least, to negotiate it. With pain in his heart, he felt that this beautiful boy was completely indifferent to the furtive messages he was sending with his eyes. Still, he approached and talked with him for a moment. He was the son of a Barbadian clergyman and hoped to be an accountant. He was studying in a commercial academy and soon, during vacation, he would accompany his father to Jamaica. Roger invited him to have ice cream, but the boy refused.

Back at his hotel, seized with excitement, he wrote in his diary, in the vulgar, telegraphic language he used for the most intimate episodes. “Public bath. Clergyman’s son. Very beautiful. Long, delicate penis that stiffened in my hands. I took him into my mouth. Happiness for two minutes.” He masturbated and bathed again, soaping himself carefully as he tried to drive away the sadness and feeling of loneliness that tended to afflict him at times like this.

The next day, at noon, as he was having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in the port of Bridgetown, he saw Andrés O’Donnell. He called to him. Arana’s former overseer, the chief of the Entre Ríos station, recognized him immediately. He looked at him for a few seconds with distrust and some fright. But finally he shook his hand and agreed to sit down with him. He drank coffee and a glass of brandy while they talked. He admitted that Roger’s passing through Putumayo had been like the curse of a Huitoto witch doctor for the rubber barons. As soon as he left, the rumor circulated that police and judges would soon arrive with arrest orders, and all the chiefs, overseers, and foremen on the rubber plantations would have problems with the law. And, since Arana’s company was British, they would be sent to England and tried there. For that reason many of them, like O’Donnell, had preferred to leave the area and head for Brazil, Colombia, or Ecuador. He had come here on the promise of a job on a sugarcane plantation but didn’t obtain it. Now he was trying to leave for the United States, where, it seemed, there were opportunities on the railroads. Sitting on the terrace, with no boots, no pistol, and no whip, wearing old overalls and a frayed shirt, he was nothing more than a poor devil agonizing over his future.

“You don’t know it, but you owe me your life, Señor Casement,” he remarked with a bitter smile as he was saying goodbye. “Though undoubtedly you won’t believe me.”

“Tell me in any event,” Roger urged.

“Armando Normand was convinced that if you left there alive, all of us plantation chiefs would go to prison. The best thing would be if you drowned in the river or were eaten by a puma or an alligator. You understand me. The same thing that happened to that French explorer, Eugène Robuchon, who began to make people nervous with all the questions he asked, and they made him disappear.”

“Why didn’t you kill me? It would have been very easy with all the practice you’ve had.”

“I made them see the possible consequences,” Andrés O’Donnell declared with a certain arrogance. “Víctor Macedo supported me. Since you were English, and Don Julio’s company too, they’d try us in England under English laws. And hang us.”

“I’m not English, I’m Irish,” Roger corrected him. “Things probably wouldn’t have happened as you think. In any case, thanks very much. But it would be better if you left right away and didn’t tell me where you were going. I’m obliged to report that I’ve seen you, and the British government will quickly issue an order for your arrest.”

That afternoon, he returned to the public bath. He had better luck than the day before. A brawny, smiling, dark-skinned mulatto, whom he had seen lifting weights in the exercise room, smiled at him, took his arm, and led him to a small room where they sold drinks. As they drank pineapple and banana juice and he told him his name, Stanley Weeks, he moved very close until their legs touched. Then, with a little smile filled with mischief, he led Roger by the arm to a small dressing room, whose door he locked with a bolt as soon as they entered. They kissed, nibbled at ears and neck as they removed their trousers. Roger observed, choking with desire, Stanley’s very black phallus and red, wet glans, growing thick before his eyes. “Two pounds if you suck it,” Roger heard him say. “Then, I’ll take you up the ass.” He agreed, kneeling. Afterward, in his hotel room, he wrote in his diary: “Public bath. Stanley Weeks, athletic, young, 27. Enormous, very hard, 9 inches at least. Kisses, bites, penetration with a shout. Two pounds.”

Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Barbados for Pará on September 5 on the Boniface, an uncomfortable, small, crowded ship that smelled bad and had dreadful food. But Roger enjoyed the passage to Pará because of Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey, a North American physician. He had worked for Arana’s company in El Encanto and, in addition to corroborating the horrors that Roger already knew about, he recounted many anecdotes, some savage and others amusing, about his experiences in Putumayo. He turned out to be a man of adventurous spirit, sensitive and well-read, who had traveled half the world. It was pleasant to watch nightfall on the deck sitting beside him, smoking, drinking whiskey from the bottle, and listening to his intelligent comments. Dr. Dickey approved the efforts made by Great Britain and the United States to remedy the atrocities in Amazonia, but he was a fatalist and a skeptic: things would not change there, not today or in the future.

“We carry wickedness in our souls, my friend,” he said, half joking, half serious. “We won’t be rid of it so easily. In the countries of Europe, and in mine, it is more disguised and reveals itself only when there’s a war, a revolution, a riot. It needs pretexts to become public and collective. In Amazonia, on the other hand, it can reveal itself openly and perpetrate the worst monstrosities without the justifications of patriotism or religion. Only pure, hard greed. The evil that poisons us is everywhere human beings are, its roots buried deep in our hearts.”

But immediately after making these lugubrious statements, he would tell a joke or recount an anecdote that seemed to disprove them. Roger enjoyed talking to Dr. Dickey, even though, at the same time, it depressed him a little. The Boniface reached Pará on September 10 at noon. All the time he had been there as consul, he had felt frustrated and suffocated. Still, several days before arriving in the port he experienced waves of desire as he thought about the Praça do Palácio. He would go there at night to pick up one of the boys who strolled there looking for clients or adventures under the trees, wearing very tight trousers that showed off their ass and testicles.

He stayed at the Hotel do Comércio, feeling in his body the rebirth of the old fever that took possession of him when he undertook those walks on the Praça. He recalled—or was he inventing them?—some names from those encounters that generally ended in a nearby shabby hotel or, at times, in a dark corner on the grass in the park. He anticipated those rapid, unplanned meetings, feeling his heart racing. But tonight he was unlucky, too, because Marco, Olympio, and Bebé (were those their names?) did not appear, and instead he was almost assaulted by two ragged vagrants who were practically children. One tried to put a hand in his pocket, looking for a wallet he did not carry, while the other asked him for directions. He got rid of them by giving one a shove that sent him rolling on the ground. When they saw his decisive attitude, they ran away. He returned to the hotel in a fury. He calmed down by writing in his diary: “Praça do Palácio: a thick, very hard one. Breathless. Drops of blood on my underwear. A pleasurable pain.”

The next morning he visited the British consul and some European and Brazilian acquaintances from his previous stay in Pará. His inquiries were useful. He located at least two fugitives from Putumayo. The consul and the local police chief assured him that José Inocente Fonseca and Alfredo Montt, after spending some time on a plantation on the banks of the Yavarí River, were now settled in Manaus, where Casa Arana had found them work in the port as customs inspectors. Roger immediately telegraphed the Foreign Office to ask the Brazilian authorities for an arrest order for this pair of criminals. And three days later they responded that Petrópolis looked favorably on this request. It would immediately order the Manaus police to arrest Montt and Fonseca. They would not be extradited but tried in Brazil instead.

His second and third nights in Pará were more fruitful than the first. At nightfall on the second day, a barefoot boy selling flowers practically offered himself when Roger sounded him out, asking the price of a bouquet of roses he had in his hand. They went to a small cleared lot where, in the shadows, Roger heard the panting of couples. These street encounters, in precarious conditions always full of risk, infused him with contradictory feelings: excitement and disgust. The flower seller smelled of armpits, but his thick breath and hot body and the strength of his embrace heated him and led very quickly to a climax. When he walked into the Hotel do Comércio, he realized that his trousers were dirty and stained, and the receptionist was looking at him in surprise. “I was attacked,” he told him.

The next night, on the Praça do Palácio, he had another encounter, this time with a young man who asked him for money. He invited him for a stroll, and at a kiosk they had a glass of rum. João took him to a hut of cane and rushes in an impoverished district. As they undressed and made love in the dark on a fiber mat on the dirt floor, listening to dogs barking, Roger was sure that at any moment he would feel the edge of a knife on his head or the blow of a stick. He was prepared: at times like this he never carried much money or his watch or silver pen, just a few bills and coins so he could let himself be robbed and placate the thieves. But nothing happened. João accompanied him to the area near his hotel and said goodbye, biting his mouth with a great guffaw. The next day, Roger discovered that João or the flower seller had given him crabs. He had to go to a pharmacy to buy calomel, which was always disagreeable: the druggist—it was worse if she was a woman—would stare at him in a way that embarrassed him or, at times, give him a complicit little smile that both disconcerted and enraged him.

The best but also the worst experience in the twelve days he was in Pará was his visit to the Da Mattas. They were the closest friends he had made during his stay in the city: Junio, a road engineer, and his wife, Irene, who painted watercolors. Young, good-looking, joyful, easygoing, they exhaled love of life. They had a charming little girl, María, with large laughing eyes. Roger had met them at a social gathering or an official ceremony, because Junio worked for the Department of Public Works in the local government. They saw one another frequently, walked along the river, went to the movies and the theater. They welcomed their old friend with open arms. They took him to supper at a restaurant that served very spicy Bahian food, and little María, who was five years old, danced and sang for him, making amusing faces.

That night, lying awake for a long time in his bed at the Hotel do Comércio, Roger fell into one of the depressions that had accompanied him almost his entire life, especially after a day or series of sexual encounters on the street. It saddened him to know he would never have a home like the one the Da Mattas had, that his life would be more and more solitary as he grew older. He paid dearly for those minutes of mercenary pleasure. He would die without having tasted that warm intimacy, a wife with whom to discuss the day’s events and plan the future—travels, vacations, dreams—or children to carry on his name and memory when he had left this world. His old age, if he ever had one, would be like that of stray animals. And just as miserable, for even though he had earned a decent salary as a diplomat, he had never been able to save because of the number of donations he gave to humanitarian associations that fought against slavery, for the survival of primitive peoples and cultures, and now, the organizations defending Gaelic and the traditions of Ireland.

But even more than all that, it embittered him to think he would die without having known true love, a shared love, like Junio and Irene’s, the silent complicity and intelligence one could guess at between them, the tenderness with which they held hands or exchanged smiles, seeing little María’s enthusiasm. As usual during these crises, he lay awake for many hours, and when he finally managed to sleep, he sensed the languid figure of his mother taking shape in the shadows of his room.

On September 22, Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Pará for Manaus on the steamboat Hildebrand of the Booth Line, an ugly, calamitous ship. The six days they spent sailing to Manaus were torture for Roger, because of the narrowness of his cabin, the pervasive filth, the execrable food, and the clouds of mosquitoes that attacked the passengers from dusk to dawn.

As soon as they disembarked in Manaus, Roger resumed the hunt for fugitives from Putumayo. Accompanied by the British consul, he went to see the governor, Senhor Dos Reis, who confirmed that an order had come from the central government in Petrópolis to arrest Montt and Fonseca. And why hadn’t the police detained them yet? The governor gave him an answer he thought either stupid or a simple pretext: they had been waiting for his arrival. Could they do it right now, before the two birds flew? They would do it today.

The consul and Roger, with the arrest order from Petrópolis, had to make two trips back and forth between the government offices and the police. Finally, the police chief sent two officers to detain Montt and Fonseca in the customs office in the port.

The next morning, the crestfallen British consul came to announce to Roger that the arrest attempt had had a grotesque, farcical outcome. He had just been informed by the chief of police, who begged a thousand pardons and promised to make amends, that the two officers sent to arrest Montt and Fonseca knew them, and before taking them to the police station, they all went to have a few beers. They had become very drunk, and the criminals had fled. Since one couldn’t discount the possibility they had received money to allow their escape, the police in question were under arrest. If corruption were proven, they would be severely punished. “I’m sorry, Sir Roger,” the consul said, “but even though I didn’t say anything to you, I expected something like this. You were a diplomat in Brazil, and you know this kind of thing all too well. It’s normal here.”

Roger felt so ill that the vexation increased his physical indisposition. He stayed in bed most of the time with fever and muscular pains as he waited for the ship to Iquitos to sail. One afternoon, as he struggled against the feeling of impotence that overcame him, he fantasized in his diary: “Three lovers in one night, two sailors among them. They fucked me six times! I walked back to the hotel, my legs wide like a woman in labor.” In the middle of his bad humor, the barbarity he had written made him laugh out loud. He, so well bred and polished in his vocabulary with other people, always felt, in the privacy of his diary, an irresistible need to write obscenities. For reasons he didn’t understand, salacious language made him feel better.

The Hildebrand continued the journey on October 3, and after a rough voyage with torrential rains and an encounter with a small embankment, it reached Iquitos at dawn on October 6, 1911. Waiting for him at the port, hat in hand, was Stirs. His replacement, George Michell, along with his wife, would arrive soon. The consul was finding a house for them. This time Roger didn’t stay at his residence but in the Hotel Amazonas, near the Plaza de Armas, while Stirs took Omarino and Arédomi with him temporarily. Both boys had decided to remain in the city and work as domestic servants instead of returning to Putumayo. Stirs promised to take care of finding them a family that wanted to employ them and would treat them well.

As Roger feared, given what had happened in Brazil, the news here wasn’t encouraging either. Stirs didn’t know how many of the long list of 237 Casa Arana managers presumed guilty, whom Dr. Valcárcel had ordered to be arrested after receiving Rómulo Paredes’s report on his expedition to Putumayo, had actually been detained. He hadn’t been able to find out because a strange silence reigned in Iquitos regarding the subject, as well as the whereabouts of Judge Valcárcel. He had been impossible to locate for several weeks. The general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company, Pablo Zumaeta, who appeared on that list, seemed to be in hiding, but Stirs assured Roger his concealment was a farce because Arana’s brother-in-law and his wife, Petronila, showed up at restaurants and local fiestas and no one bothered them.

Later, Roger would remember these eight weeks in Iquitos as a slow shipwreck, a gradual sinking into a sea of intrigues, false rumors, flagrant or intractable lies, contradictions, a world where no one told the truth because that made enemies and problems or, more frequently, because people lived inside a system in which it was practically impossible to distinguish falsehood from truth, reality from a swindle. Ever since his years in the Congo, he had known that desperate feeling of having fallen into quicksand, a muddy ground that swallowed him up and where his efforts served only to plunge him deeper into a viscous substance that would eventually engulf him. He had to get out right away!

The day after his arrival he went to visit the prefect of Iquitos. Again, there was a new one. Señor Adolfo Gamarra—heavy mustache, prominent belly, lit cigar, nervous clammy hands—received him in his office with embraces and congratulations:

“Thanks to you,” he said, opening his arms theatrically and clapping his hands, “a monstrous social injustice has been uncovered in the heart of Amazonia. The Peruvian government and people have acknowledged you, Señor Casement.”

Immediately afterward he added that the report the Peruvian government had charged Judge Valcárcel with writing to satisfy the requirements of the British government was “formidable” and “devastating.” It consisted of close to three thousand pages and confirmed all the accusations Britain had transmitted to President Leguía.

But when Roger asked if he could have a copy of the report, the prefect replied that this was a state document and it lay outside his jurisdiction to authorize a foreigner to read it. The honorable consul ought to present a request in Lima to the supreme government, through official channels, and he undoubtedly would obtain permission. When Roger asked what he could do to have an interview with Judge Valcárcel, the prefect became very serious and recited in a single breath:

“I have no idea where Dr. Valcárcel is. His mission has ended and I understand he’s left the country.”

Roger left the prefecture completely stunned. What was really going on? This individual had told him nothing but lies. That same afternoon he went to the offices of El Oriente to speak with its editor, Dr. Rómulo Paredes. He found a very dark-skinned, graying man of about fifty in his shirtsleeves, covered with perspiration, irresolute, in the grip of panic. As soon as Roger began to speak, he silenced him with a peremptory gesture that seemed to say: Careful, the walls have ears. He took him by the arm and led him to a small bar on the corner called La Chipirona. He had him sit at an isolated table.

“I beg you to forgive me, Consul,” he said, always looking around him with suspicion. “I can’t and shouldn’t tell you very much. I’m in a very compromised situation. If people were to see me with you it would represent a great risk to me.”

He looked pale, his voice trembled, and he had begun to bite a nail. He ordered a glass of brandy and drank it down. He listened in silence to Roger’s account of his interview with Prefect Gamarra.

“He’s a supreme hypocrite,” he said at last, emboldened by his drink. “Gamarra has a report of mine, corroborating all of Judge Valcárcel’s accusations. I gave it to him in July. More than three months have passed and he hasn’t sent it to Lima. Why do you think he’s kept it so long? Because everybody knows that Prefect Adolfo Gamarra is, like half of Iquitos, also an employee of Arana’s.”

As for Judge Valcárcel, Dr. Paredes said he had left the country. He didn’t know where he had gone but did know that if the judge had remained in Iquitos, he would have been a corpse by now. He stood abruptly:

“Which is what will probably happen to me at any moment, Consul.” He wiped away perspiration as he spoke and Roger thought he was going to burst into tears. “Because I, unfortunately, can’t leave. I have a wife and children and my only occupation is the paper.”

He left without even saying goodbye. Roger went back to see the prefect, infuriated. Señor Gamarra admitted that, in fact, the report written by Dr. Paredes couldn’t be sent to Lima “because of logistical problems, happily resolved.” It would go out this week without fail, “and with a courier for greater security, for President Leguía himself is urgently demanding it.”

It was all like this. Roger felt rocked in a lulling eddy, going around and around in place, manipulated by tortuous, invisible forces. All the measures, promises, pieces of information fell apart and dissolved without the facts ever corresponding to the words. What was done and what was said were worlds apart. Words negated facts and facts gave the lie to words and it all functioned in a generalized fraud, a chronic divorce between saying and doing that everyone practiced.

During the week, he made multiple inquiries regarding Judge Valcárcel. Like Saldaña Roca, he inspired respect, affection, pity, and admiration in Roger. Everyone promised to help him, find out, take him the message, locate him, but he was sent from one place to another without anyone offering any serious explanation about the judge’s situation. Finally, seven days after arriving in Iquitos, he managed to escape his maddening web thanks to an Englishman who lived in the city. Mr. F. J. Harding, manager of John Lilly & Company, was a tall, robust bachelor, almost bald, and one of the few businessmen in Iquitos who did not seem to dance to the tune of the Peruvian Amazon Company.

“No one is telling you or will tell you what has happened to Judge Valcárcel because they’re afraid to find themselves involved in the imbroglio, Sir Roger.” They were talking in Mr. Harding’s small house near the embankment. On the walls were engravings of Scottish castles. They were having a coconut drink. “Arana’s connections in Lima arranged for Judge Valcárcel to be dismissed, accused of lying and I don’t know how many other falsehoods. The poor man, if he’s alive, must bitterly regret the worst mistake of his life: accepting this assignment. He came to put his head in the lion’s mouth and has paid dearly for it. He was highly respected in Lima, it seems. Now they’ve dragged him through the mud and perhaps killed him. No one knows where he is. I hope he did leave. Talking about him in Iquitos has become taboo.”

In fact, the story of the upright and fearless Dr. Carlos A. Valcárcel who came to Iquitos to investigate the “horrors of Putumayo” could not be sadder. Roger reconstructed it in the course of these weeks as if it were a puzzle. When he had the audacity to issue an arrest order against 237 people for alleged crimes, almost all of them connected to the Peruvian Amazon Company, a shudder ran through Amazonia, not only in the Peruvian Amazon but the Colombian and Brazilian as well. The machinery of Julio C. Arana’s empire immediately denounced the blow and began a counteroffensive. The police could locate only nine of the 237 men incriminated. Of these, the only really important one was Aurelio Rodríguez, one of the section chiefs in Putumayo, responsible for a long criminal record of abductions, rapes, mutilations, kidnappings, and murders. But the nine men arrested, including Rodríguez, presented a writ of habeas corpus in the Superior Court of Iquitos and the court granted them provisional freedom while it studied their documents.

“Unfortunately,” the prefect said to Roger without blinking, putting on a deeply sorrowful face, “these bad citizens, taking advantage of their provisional freedom, fled. As you must know, it will be difficult to find them in the immensity of Amazonia if the Superior Court revalidates the arrest order.”

The court was in no hurry to do so, for when Roger went to ask the judges when they would review the documents, they explained that this was done “following a strict first-come-first-served order of cases.” A large number of cases were in line “ahead of the one that interests you.” One of the court clerks permitted himself to add, in a mocking tone:

“Here justice is sure but slow, and these procedures can last for many years, Consul.”

Pablo Zumaeta, from his supposed hiding place, orchestrated the judicial offensive against Judge Valcárcel through figureheads, initiating multiple denunciations for prevarication, embezzlement, false witness, and various other crimes. One morning a Bora woman and her daughter, only a few years old, accompanied by an interpreter, came to the Iquitos police station to accuse Judge Valcárcel of “an attempt against the honor of a minor.” The judge had to spend most of his time defending himself against slanderous fabrications, making statements, delivering and writing communications instead of devoting himself to the investigation that had brought him to the jungle. The entire world was falling down on him. The small hotel where he was staying, the Yurimaguas, evicted him. He did not find an inn or a pension in the city that would dare take him in. He had to rent a small room in Nanay, a district filled with garbage dumps and standing pools of foul water, where at night he heard rats running beneath his hammock and he stepped on cockroaches.

Roger learned all of this piece by piece, the details whispered here and there, while his admiration grew for the magistrate whose hand he would have liked to shake and whom he wanted to congratulate for his decency and courage. What had happened to him? The only thing he could find out with certainty, though the word certainty did not seem to have firm roots in the soil of Iquitos, was that when the order to dismiss him came from Lima, Carlos A. Valcárcel had already disappeared. From then on no one in the city could say where he was. Had they killed him? The story of the journalist Benjamín Saldaña Roca was being repeated. Hostility toward him had been so great he had no choice but to run. In a second interview, in the house of Stirs, Rómulo Paredes told him:

“I myself advised Judge Valcárcel to move before they killed him, Sir Roger. He had already received a fair number of warnings.”

What kind of warnings? Provocations in the restaurants and bars where Judge Valcárcel went to eat or have a beer. Suddenly a drunk would insult him and challenge him to a fight, displaying a knife. If the judge made an accusation to the police or at the Prefecture, they had him fill out interminable forms, recounting the facts in detail, and assured him “they would investigate his complaint.”

Roger soon felt as Judge Valcárcel must have felt before he escaped Iquitos or was annihilated by one of the killers on Arana’s payroll: deceived wherever he went, turned into the laughingstock of a community of puppets whose strings were moved by the Peruvian Amazon Company, which all of Iquitos obeyed with base subservience.

He had proposed returning to Putumayo, though it was evident that if here in the city Arana’s company had successfully mocked the sanctions and avoided the announced reforms, on the rubber plantations everything would be the same or worse than before as far as the indigenous people were concerned. Rómulo Paredes, Stirs, and Prefect Gamarra urged him to give up that trip.

“You won’t get out alive, and your death will serve no purpose,” the editor of El Oriente assured him. “Señor Casement, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re the most hated man in Putumayo. Not even Saldaña Roca, or the gringo Hardenburg, or Judge Valcárcel are as despised as you. It was a miracle I came back alive from Putumayo. But that miracle won’t be repeated if you go there to be crucified. Besides, do you know something? The most absurd thing will be that they’ll have you killed with poisoned darts from the blowguns of the Boras and Huitotos you’re defending. Don’t go, don’t be foolish. Don’t commit suicide.”

As soon as Prefect Gamarra learned of his preparations to travel to Putumayo, he came to see him at the Hotel Amazonas. He was very alarmed. He took him to have a beer at a bar where they played Brazilian music. It was the only time Roger thought the official spoke to him with sincerity.

“I beg you to reject this madness, Señor Casement,” he said, looking him in the eye. “I have no way to guarantee your protection. I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the truth. I don’t want the burden of your corpse on my service record. It would be the end of my career. I tell you this with my heart in my hand. You won’t reach Putumayo. I’ve arranged, with great effort, for no one to touch you here. It hasn’t been easy, I swear. I’ve had to beg and threaten the men who give the orders. But my authority disappears beyond the city limits. Don’t go to Putumayo. For your sake and for mine. For the sake of what you love best, don’t ruin my future. I’m speaking to you as a friend, truly.”

But what finally made him give up the trip was an unexpected, abrupt visitor in the middle of the night. He was already lying down and about to fall asleep when the reception clerk of the Hotel Amazonas knocked on his door. A gentleman was asking for him and said it was very urgent. He dressed, went downstairs, and saw Juan Tizón. He had lost track of him since his travels to Putumayo, when this high official in the Peruvian Amazon Company collaborated so loyally with the commission. He wasn’t even a shadow of the self-confident man Roger recalled. He looked aged, exhausted, and above all demoralized.

They looked for a quiet place but it was impossible because the Iquitos night was filled with noise, drunkenness, gambling, and sex. They resigned themselves to sitting in the Pim Pam, a bar-nightclub where they had to get rid of two Brazilian mulattas who pestered them to dance. They ordered a couple of beers.

Always with the gentlemanly air and elegant manners that Roger remembered, Tizón spoke to him in a way that seemed absolutely sincere.

“Nothing of what the company put forward has been done, in spite of the fact that after the request from President Leguía, we agreed to it at a meeting of the board of directors. When I presented my report, everyone, including Pablo Zumaeta and Arana’s brothers and other brothers-in-law, agreed with me that radical improvements had to be made at the stations. To avoid problems with the law and for moral, Christian reasons. Sheer prattle. Nothing has been or will be done.”

He told him that except for instructing its employees in Putumayo to take precautions and erase all traces of past abuses—make the corpses disappear, for example—the company had facilitated the flight of the most important of the men incriminated in the report London sent to the Peruvian government. The system of harvesting rubber with a coerced indigenous labor force continued as before.

“It was enough for me to set foot in Iquitos to realize nothing had changed,” Roger agreed. “And you, Don Juan?”

“I’m returning to Lima next week and don’t think I’ll be back here. My situation in the Peruvian Amazon Company became untenable. I preferred to leave before they could dismiss me. They’ll buy back my shares, but at a miserable price. In Lima, I’ll have to work at other things. I don’t regret that in spite of having lost ten years of my life working for Arana. Even if I have to start at zero, I feel better. After what we saw in Putumayo, I felt dirty and guilty in the company. I consulted with my wife, and she supports me.”

They spoke for close to an hour. Tizón also insisted that Roger not go back to Putumayo for any reason: he wouldn’t accomplish anything except their killing him and, perhaps, their becoming enraged in one of those excesses of cruelty he had already seen in his travels to the plantations.

Roger devoted himself to preparing a new report for the Foreign Office. He explained that no reforms at all had been made or the slightest punishment administered to the criminals of the Peruvian Amazon Company. There was no hope anything would be done in the future. The fault lay as much with the firm of Julio C. Arana as with the public administration and, perhaps, the entire country. In Iquitos, the Peruvian government was nothing more than Arana’s agent. The power of his company was so great that all political, police, and judicial institutions worked actively to permit it to continue exploiting the indigenous workers at no risk, because all the officials either received money or feared reprisals from it.

As if wanting to prove him right, during this time the Superior Court in Iquitos suddenly halted the review the nine arrested men had requested. The stoppage was a masterpiece of cynicism: all judicial action was suspended until the 237 persons on the list drawn up by Judge Valcárcel could be detained. With only a small group of prisoners, any investigation would be incomplete and illegal, the judges decreed. So the nine were definitively free and the case suspended until the police could bring all 237 suspects to trial, something, of course, that never would happen.

A few days later another event, even more grotesque, took place in Iquitos, putting Roger’s capacity for astonishment to the test. As he was going from his hotel to Stirs’s house, he saw people crowded into two locations that seemed to be state offices, since their façades displayed the seal and flag of Peru. What was going on?

“Municipal elections,” explained Stirs in his thin voice, which was so disinterested it seemed impervious to emotion. “Very peculiar elections, because according to Peruvian election law, to have the right to vote you must own property and know how to read and write. This reduces the number of electors to a few hundred people. In reality, the elections are decided in the offices of Casa Arana. The names of the winners and the percentage of votes they receive.”

It must have been true because that night, at a small rally on the Plaza de Armas, which Roger observed from a distance, bands played and brandy was distributed as they celebrated the election of Don Pablo Zumaeta as the new mayor of Iquitos! Julio C. Arana’s brother-in-law emerged from his “hiding place” indemnified by the people of Iquitos—that’s how he expressed it in his acceptance speech—from the slanders of the British–Colombian conspiracy, determined to continue fighting unyieldingly against the enemies of Peru and for the progress of Amazonia. After the distribution of alcoholic beverages, there was folk dancing with fireworks, guitars, and drums that lasted until dawn. Roger chose to withdraw to his hotel to escape being lynched.

George Michell and his wife finally arrived in Iquitos on a ship out of Manaus, on November 30, 1911. Roger was already packing for his departure. The arrival of the new British consul was preceded by frantic efforts by Stirs and Roger himself to find a house for the couple. “Great Britain has fallen into disgrace here because of you, Sir Roger,” the outgoing consul told him. “Nobody wants to rent me a house for the Michells, even though I’m offering to pay a surcharge. Everyone’s afraid of offending Arana, everyone refuses.” Roger asked Rómulo Paredes for help, and the editor of El Oriente solved the problem for them. He rented the house and sublet it to the British consulate. It was an old, dirty house that had to be renovated against the clock and furnished somehow to receive its new tenants. Mrs. Michell was a cheerful, strong-willed woman whom Roger met for the first time at the foot of the gangplank, in the port, on the day of their arrival. She was not disheartened by the state of her new home or the town she had set foot in for the first time. She seemed immune to discouragement. Without delay, even before unpacking, she set about cleaning everything with energy and good humor.

Roger had a long conversation with his old friend and colleague, George Michell, in Stirs’s small living room. He informed him in detail about the situation and didn’t hide a single one of the difficulties he would face in his new position. Michell, a plump, lively man in his forties who manifested the same energy as his wife in all his gestures and movements, took notes in a small notebook, with brief pauses to ask for clarifications. Then, instead of appearing demoralized or complaining at the prospect of what awaited him in Iquitos, he only said, with a large smile: “Now I know what’s at stake and I’m ready for the struggle.”

During his last two weeks in Iquitos, the demon of sex once again took irresistible possession of Roger. On his previous stay he had been very prudent, but now, in spite of knowing the hostility so many people connected to the rubber business felt toward him, and the kind of trap they could lay for him, he didn’t hesitate to go out at night to stroll on the embankment along the river, where there were always women and men looking for clients. This was how he met Alcibíades Ruiz, if that was his name. He took him to the Hotel Amazonas. The night porter had no objection after Roger gave him a tip. Alcibíades agreed to pose for him, assuming the postures of classical statues that he indicated. After some bargaining he agreed to undress. Alcibíades was a mestizo, white and Indian, a cholo, and Roger noted in his diary that this racial mix produced a man of great physical beauty, even greater than that of the caboclos of Brazil, in whom indigenous gentleness and sweetness mixed with the coarse virility of the descendants of Spaniards. Alcibíades and he kissed and touched but did not make love that day or the next, when Alcibíades returned to the hotel. It was morning and Roger was able to photograph him naked, in various poses. When he left, Roger wrote in his diary: “Alcibíades Ruiz. Cholo. Dancer’s movements. Thin and long, when it got hard it curved like a bow. Entered me like hand in glove.”

During this time, Rómulo Paredes was attacked on the street. When he left the print shop of his newspaper, three nasty-looking individuals stinking of alcohol assaulted him. According to what he told Roger, whom he came to see in his hotel immediately after the episode, they would have beaten him to death if he hadn’t been armed, and he frightened his three aggressors when he fired in the air. He had a suitcase with him. Don Rómulo was so shaken by what had happened he wouldn’t go out for a drink as Roger suggested. His resentment and indignation toward the Peruvian Amazon Company knew no limits:

“I was always Casa Arana’s loyal collaborator and satisfied them in everything they wished,” he complained.

They had sat on two corners of the bed and spoke in semidarkness, because the flame of the gas lamp barely lit a corner of the room. “When I was a judge and when I started El Oriente, I never opposed their requests, even though they often were repugnant to my conscience. But I’m a realistic man, Consul, I know which battles can’t be won. This commission, going to Putumayo on assignment from Judge Valcárcel, I never wanted to take it on. From the beginning I knew I’d be in trouble. They obliged me to. Pablo Zumaeta in person demanded it. I made this trip only because I was following his orders. My report, before I turned it in to the prefect, I gave it to Señor Zumaeta to read. He returned it without comment. Doesn’t that mean he accepted it? Only then did I give it to the prefect. And now it turns out they’ve declared war on me and want to kill me. This attack is a warning for me to get out of Iquitos. And go where? I have a wife, five children, and two serving girls, Señor Casement. Have you ever seen anything like the ingratitude of these people? I suggest you leave right away too. Your life is in danger, Sir Roger. Until now nothing’s happened to you, because they think if they kill an Englishman, especially a diplomat, there’ll be an international incident. But don’t trust that. Those scruples can disappear in any drunken brawl. Take my advice and leave, my friend.”

“I’m not an Englishman, I’m Irish,” Roger corrected him gently.

Rómulo Paredes handed him the suitcase he had brought with him.

“Here are all the documents I compiled in Putumayo, on which I based my work. I was right not to give them to Prefect Gamarra. They would have met the same fate as my report: eaten by moths in the Prefecture of Iquitos. Take them, I know you’ll put them to good use. But I’m sorry to load you down with another piece of luggage.”

Roger left four days later, after saying goodbye to Omarino and Arédomi. Stirs had placed them in a carpentry shop in Nanay where, in addition to working as domestics for the owner, a Bolivian, they would be his apprentices. In the port, where Stirs and Michell came to say goodbye, Roger learned that the volume of rubber exported in the past two months had surpassed the previous year’s record. What better proof that nothing had changed, that the Huitotos, Boras, Andoques, and the rest of the indigenous groups in Putumayo were still being squeezed without mercy?

For the five days of the voyage to Manaus, he barely left his cabin. He felt demoralized, sick, and disgusted with himself. He barely ate and went on deck only when the heat in the narrow room became unbearable. As they sailed down the Amazon and the riverbed widened and the banks were lost from view, he thought he would never return to this jungle. And about the paradox—he had often thought the same thing in Africa, navigating on the Congo River—that this majestic landscape with its flocks of pink herons and screeching parrots that sometimes flew overhead, and the wake of small fish following the ship, leaping and doing tricks as if to attract the passengers’ attention, harbored in the interior of these jungles vertiginous suffering caused by the greed of the avid, cruel men he had known in Putumayo. He thought of Arana’s motionless face at the meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company in London. He swore again that he would fight until the last drop of energy in his body to see him punished, this small, well-groomed man who had set in motion and was the principal beneficiary of the machinery that crushed human beings with impunity to satisfy his hunger for riches. Who would dare say now that Julio C. Arana didn’t know what was going on in Putumayo? He had put on a show to deceive everyone—the Peruvian government, the British above all—in order to continue extracting rubber from jungles as mistreated as the indigenous peoples who inhabited them.

In Manaus, where he arrived in the middle of December, he felt better. While he waited for a ship that would leave for Pará and Barbados, he could work in his hotel room, adding comments and details to his report. He spent one afternoon with the British consul, who confirmed that in spite of his demands, the Brazilian authorities had done nothing effective to capture Montt and Agüero or the other fugitives. It was rumored everywhere that several of Arana’s managers in Putumayo now worked for the Madeira–Mamoré railroad that was under construction.

For the week he stayed in Manaus, Roger led a spartan life, not going out at night in search of adventures. He would take walks along the riverbanks and streets of the city, and when he wasn’t working spent many hours reading the books on the ancient history of Ireland recommended to him by Alice Stopford Green. A passion for his country’s affairs would help rid his mind of images of Putumayo and the intrigues, lies, and abuses of the widespread political corruption he had seen in Iquitos. But it wasn’t easy to concentrate on Irish affairs, for he constantly thought he had not finished his assignment and would have to bring it to its conclusion in London.

On December 17 he set sail for Pará, where he finally found a communication from the Foreign Office. They had received his telegrams sent from Iquitos and were aware that in spite of the Peruvian government’s promises, nothing real had been done against the excesses in Putumayo except for permitting the escape of those accused.

On Christmas Eve, he left for Barbados on the Denis, a comfortable ship carrying barely a handful of passengers. It was a calm crossing to Bridgetown. There, the Foreign Office had reserved passage for him on the S.S. Terence, bound for New York. The British authorities had decided to take energetic action against the British company responsible for events in Putumayo and wanted the United States to join their effort and protest together to the government of Peru for its unwillingness to respond to the demands of public opinion.

In the capital of Barbados, as he waited for the ship to sail, Roger’s life was as chaste as it had been in Manaus: not one visit to the public bath, not one nocturnal escapade. He had reentered one of those periods of sexual abstinence that on occasion lasted many months. At times his mind became filled with religious concerns. In Bridgetown he visited Father Smith every day. He had long conversations with him about the New Testament, which he usually carried with him on his journeys. He reread it from time to time, alternating this reading with the Irish poets, above all Yeats, some of whose poems he had memorized. He attended a Mass at the convent of the Ursulines and, as had happened to him before, felt the desire to take communion. He told Father Smith and he, smiling, reminded him he wasn’t a Catholic but a member of the Anglican Church. If he wanted to convert, he offered to help him take the first steps. Roger was tempted but changed his mind, thinking about the weaknesses and sins he would have to confess to this good friend, Father Smith.

On December 31 he left on the S.S. Terence for New York, and immediately upon arriving, without time even to admire the skyscrapers, took the train to Washington, D.C. The British ambassador, James Bryce, surprised him by announcing that the president of the United States, William Howard Taft, had agreed to see him. He and his advisers wanted to hear from the mouth of Sir Roger, who personally knew what was going on in Putumayo and was a man trusted by the British government, the situation on the rubber plantations, and whether the campaign being waged in the United States and Great Britain by various churches, humanitarian organizations, and liberal journalists and publications was true or sheer demagoguery and exaggeration, as the rubber enterprises and the Peruvian government insisted.

Staying in the residence of Ambassador Bryce, treated like royalty and hearing himself called Sir Roger wherever he went, he visited a barbershop and had his hair and beard trimmed and his nails manicured. And he renewed his wardrobe in the elegant shops of Washington. Often during this time he thought about the contradictions in his life. Less than two weeks before he had been a poor devil threatened with death in a run-down hotel in Iquitos, and now, an Irishman who dreamed about the independence of Ireland, he was the embodiment of an official sent by the British Crown to persuade the president of the United States to help the Empire demand that the Peruvian government respond forcefully to the ignominy of Amazonia. Wasn’t life an absurdity, a dramatic representation that suddenly turned into farce?

The three days he spent in Washington were dizzying: daily working sessions with officials from the State Department and a long personal interview with the secretary for foreign relations. On the third day he was received at the White House by President Taft in the company of several advisers and the secretary of state. For an instant, before beginning his exposition on Putumayo, Roger had a hallucination: he wasn’t there as a diplomatic representative of the British Crown but as a special envoy of the recently constituted Republic of Ireland. He had been sent by his provisional government to defend the reasons that had led the immense majority of the Irish, in a plebiscite, to break their connections to Great Britain and proclaim independence. The new Ireland wanted to maintain relations of friendship and cooperation with the United States, with whom they shared a devotion to democracy and where a large community of people of Irish background lived.

Roger fulfilled his obligations impeccably. The meeting was supposed to last half an hour but was three times as long, for President Taft, who listened with great attention to his report on the situation of the indigenous people in Putumayo, asked many thoughtful questions and solicited his opinion regarding the best way to oblige the Peruvian government to put an end to the crimes on the rubber plantations. Roger’s suggestion that the United States open a consulate in Iquitos, which would work together with the British to denounce the abuses was well received by the president. And, in fact, a few weeks later, the United States sent a career diplomat, Stuart J. Fuller, to Iquitos as consul.

More than the words he heard, the surprise and indignation with which President Taft and his colleagues listened to his report convinced Roger that from now on the United States would collaborate in a decisive way with Britain in denouncing the situation of the Amazonian Indians.

In London, even though his physical condition was constantly weakened by fatigue and old ailments, he dedicated himself body and soul to completing his new report for the Foreign Office, demonstrating that the Peruvian authorities had not carried out the promised reforms and the Peruvian Amazon Company had boycotted every initiative, making life impossible for Judge Valcárcel and keeping in the Prefecture the report by Rómulo Paredes, whom they had attempted to kill for having described impartially what he had witnessed during the four months (from March 15 to July 15) he spent on Arana’s rubber plantations. Roger began to translate into English a selection of the testimonies, interviews, and various documents Paredes had given him in Iquitos. This material enriched his own report considerably.

He did this at night, because his days were filled with meetings at the Foreign Office where everyone from the chancellor to multiple commissions requested reports, advice, and suggestions regarding the ideas for taking action that the British government was considering. The atrocities a British company was committing in Amazonia that had been the object of a vigorous campaign initiated by the Anti-Slavery Society and Truth was supported now by the liberal press and many religious and humanitarian organizations.

Roger insisted that the Report on Putumayo be published immediately. He had lost all hope that the silent diplomacy the British government had attempted with President Leguía would have an effect. In spite of resistance from several sectors in the administration, Sir Edward Grey finally agreed and the cabinet approved its publication as a Blue Book. Roger spent many nights awake, smoking constantly and drinking countless cups of coffee, revising the final copy word by word.

The day the definitive text went to the printer at last, he felt so ill that, fearing something might happen if he were alone, he took refuge in the house of his friend Alice Stopford Green. “You look like a skeleton,” she said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the living room. Roger was shuffling his feet and, in a daze, felt that at any moment he would lose consciousness. Almost immediately he fell asleep or fainted. When he opened his eyes, he saw sitting beside him, together and smiling, his sister Nina and Alice.

“We thought you would never wake up,” he heard one of them say.

He had slept close to twenty-four hours. Alice called the family doctor, whose diagnosis was exhaustion. They should let him sleep. He didn’t recall having slept. When he tried to get up his legs folded and he let himself fall back onto the sofa. The Congo didn’t kill me but the Amazon will, he thought.

After having some light refreshment, he was able to stand, and a car took him to his Philbeach Gardens apartment. He took a long bath that helped clear his mind. But he felt so weak he had to lie down again.

The Foreign Office obliged him to take a ten-day vacation. He resisted leaving London before the appearance of his report, but he finally agreed to go. Accompanied by Nina, who requested leave from the school where she taught, he spent a week in Cornwall. His fatigue was so great he could barely concentrate on reading. His mind scattered in dissolute images. Thanks to a quiet life and healthy diet, he began recuperating his strength. He could take long walks in the countryside, enjoying some mild days. There could be nothing more different from the pleasant, civilized landscape of Cornwall than Amazonia, and yet, in spite of the well-being and serenity he felt here, seeing the routine of the farmers, the beatific cows grazing, the horses neighing in the stables, with no threat of wild animals, snakes, or mosquitoes, one day he found himself thinking this populated, civilized nature, revealing centuries of agricultural labor in the service of humanity, had lost its state of being part of the natural world—its soul, pantheists would say—compared with the savage, agitated, indomitable, untamed territory of Amazonia, where everything seemed to be coming to life or dying, an unstable, risky, shifting world where a man felt torn out of the present and thrown into the most distant past, in communication with his ancestors, returned to the dawn of human history. And he discovered in surprise that he recalled it all with nostalgia, in spite of the horrors it hid.

The Blue Book on Putumayo was published in July 1912. From the first day it produced an upheaval that, with London as its center, advanced in concentric waves through all of Europe, the United States, and many other parts of the world, especially Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. The Times dedicated several pages to it, and an editorial that praised Roger Casement to the skies, saying that once again he had demonstrated exceptional gifts as a “great humanitarian,” and at the same time demanded immediate action against this British company and its shareholders who benefitted financially from an industry that practiced slavery and torture and was exterminating indigenous peoples.

But the praise that moved Roger most was the article written by Edmund D. Morel, his friend and ally in the campaign against Leopold II, king of the Belgians, in the Daily News. Commenting on Roger’s report, he said of Roger that he “had never seen as much magnetism in a human being as in him.” Always allergic to public display, Roger did not enjoy in any way this new wave of popularity. Rather, he felt uncomfortable and sought to avoid it. But it was difficult because the uproar caused by his document meant that dozens of British, European, and North American publications wanted to interview him. He received invitations to give lectures at academic institutions, political clubs, religious and charitable centers. A special service on the subject was held in Westminster Abbey, and Canon Herbert Henson gave a sermon harshly attacking the stockholders in the Peruvian Amazon Company for reaping profits from the practice of slavery, murder, and mutilation.

The chargé d’affaires for Great Britain in Peru, Des Graz, reported on the stir caused in Lima by the accusations in Roger’s report. The Peruvian government, fearing an economic boycott by Western countries, announced the immediate implementation of reforms and the dispatch of military and police forces to Putumayo. But Des Graz added that the announcement probably wouldn’t be effective this time either, since there were governmental sectors that viewed the actions cited in Roger’s report as a conspiracy of the British Empire to favor Colombian claims in Putumayo.

The atmosphere of interest in and solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Amazonia awakened in the public by Roger’s document meant that the project of opening a Catholic mission in Putumayo received a great deal of economic support. The Anglican Church had some objections but eventually let itself be convinced by Roger’s arguments after countless meetings, appointments, letters, and dialogues: in a country where the Catholic Church was so deeply rooted, a Protestant mission would awaken suspicions and the Peruvian Amazon Company would be sure to slander it, presenting it as the spearhead of the Crown’s colonizing appetites.

In Ireland and England, Roger had meetings with Jesuits and Franciscans, two orders he had always liked. Ever since he had been in the Congo, he had read about the past efforts of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay and Brazil to organize the Indians, catechize them, and gather them into communities where, while they maintained their traditions of working in common, they practiced an elementary Christianity, which had raised their standards of living and freed them from exploitation and extermination. For that reason, Portugal destroyed the Jesuit missions and plotted until they convinced Spain and the Vatican that the Society of Jesus had become a state within the state and constituted a danger to papal authority and Spanish imperial sovereignty. Nonetheless, the Jesuits did not receive the project of an Amazonian mission with much warmth. On the other hand, the Franciscans adopted it enthusiastically.

This was how Roger became familiar with the efforts of the Franciscan worker-priests in the poorest neighborhoods of Dublin. They labored in factories and workshops and experienced the same difficulties and privations as the workers. Conversing with them, seeing the devotion with which they carried out their ministry as they shared the fate of the disinherited, Roger thought no one was better prepared than these religious men for the challenge of establishing missions in La Chorrera and El Encanto.

Alice Stopford Green, with whom Roger went in a state of euphoria to celebrate the departure for the Peruvian Amazon of the first four Irish Franciscans, predicted:

“Are you sure you still belong to the Anglican Church, Roger? Though you may not realize it, you’re on a one-way road to a papist conversion.”

Among the habitual participants in Alice’s evenings in the abundant library of her house on Grosvenor Road were Irish nationalists: Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics. Roger had never noticed frictions or disputes. After Alice’s observation, he often asked himself during this time if his approach to Catholicism was strictly a spiritual and religious disposition or a political one, a way of committing himself even more closely to the nationalist option, since the immense majority of the supporters of independence in Ireland were Catholic.

In order to somehow escape the pursuit of which he was the object as author of the report, he asked the ministry for a few days more of leave and went to spend them in Germany. Berlin made an extraordinary impression on him. German society, under the Kaiser, seemed a model of modernity, economic development, order, and efficiency. Though brief, this visit helped to make concrete a vague idea he had been turning over in his mind for some time, and from then on it became one of the main points of his political action. To win its freedom, Ireland could not count on the understanding, much less the benevolence, of the British Empire. It was being demonstrated at this time. The mere possibility that the British parliament would again discuss the draft of a law to grant Ireland Home Rule, which Roger and his radical friends considered an insufficient formal concession, had provoked a jingoistic, enraged response not only among conservatives but also in large liberal and progressive sectors, including labor unions and artisans’ guilds. In Ireland, the prospect of the island having administrative autonomy and its own parliament mobilized and inflamed the unionists of Ulster. There were meetings, an army of volunteers was being formed, public collections were made to buy weapons, and tens of thousands of people signed a covenant in which Irishmen of the North proclaimed they would not accept Home Rule if it were approved and would defend Ireland’s remaining in the Empire with their weapons and their lives. Under these circumstances, Roger thought, the supporters of independence ought to seek solidarity with Germany. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Germany was Britain’s most notable rival. In the event of war, the military defeat of Great Britain would open a unique possibility for Irish emancipation. At this time, Roger often repeated to himself the old nationalist saying: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.”

But as he reached these political conclusions that he shared only with nationalist friends on his trips to Ireland, or in London at Alice Stopford Green’s house, it was Britain that showed affection and admiration for what he had done. Thinking about this made him feel ill.

In all this time, in spite of the desperate efforts of the Peruvian Amazon Company to avoid it, each day it was more obvious that the fate of Arana’s enterprise was threatened. Its loss of prestige was accentuated by the scandal produced when Horace Thorogood, a reporter for The Morning Leader who went to the firm’s main offices in the City to try to interview the board of directors, received from one of them, Abel Larco, a brother-in-law of Arana, an envelope filled with money. The reporter asked what it meant. Larco replied that the company was always generous to its friends. The reporter, indignant, returned the intended bribe, denounced what had happened in his paper, and the Peruvian Amazon Company had to make a public apology, saying it was a misunderstanding and those responsible for the bribery attempt would be dismissed.

The stocks of Arana’s company began to fall on the London market. And though this was due in part to competition from new exports of rubber from British colonies in Asia—Singapore, Malaya, and Ceylon—planted there with shoots taken out of Amazonia in an audacious smuggling operation by the English scientist and adventurer Henry Alexander Wickham, the key fact in the collapse of the Peruvian Amazon Company was the bad image it acquired in both public opinion and the financial media because of the publication of Roger’s report. Lloyd’s cut off its credit. Throughout Europe and the United States, a good number of banks followed this example. The boycott promoted by the Anti-Slavery Society and other organizations deprived the company of many clients and associates.

The coup de grâce for Arana’s empire was given by the establishment in the House of Commons, on March 14, 1912, of a special committee to investigate the responsibility of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo atrocities. Made up of fifteen members and presided over by a prestigious parliamentarian, Charles Roberts, it met over fifteen months. During thirty-six sessions, twenty-seven witnesses were questioned in public hearings filled with reporters, politicians, and members of lay and religious societies, among them the Anti-Slavery Society and its president, the missionary John Harris. Newspapers and magazines reported in detail on the meetings, and abundant articles, caricatures, gossip, and jokes commented on them.

The most anticipated witness, whose presence attracted an even larger audience, was Sir Roger Casement. He appeared before the commission on November 13 and December 11 of 1912. He described precisely and soberly what he had seen with his own eyes on the rubber plantations: the pillory, the great instrument of torture in all the camps, the backs with the scars of floggings, the whips and Winchester rifles carried by the station overseers and the “boys,” or “rationals,” responsible for maintaining order and attacking the tribes in the correrías, and the regimen of slavery, overexploitation, and starvation to which the indigenous people were subjected. Then he summarized the testimonies of the Barbadians, whose veracity, he pointed out, was guaranteed by the fact that almost all of them had acknowledged their own responsibility for torture and murder. At the request of the committee members, he also explained the prevailing Machiavellian system: section chiefs received not salaries but commissions on the rubber harvested, which induced them to demand more and more of the harvesters in order to increase their own earnings.

In his second appearance, Roger put on a show. Before the surprised gaze of the parliamentarians, he began taking out of a large bag, held by two ushers, objects he had acquired in the stores of the Peruvian Amazon Company in Putumayo. He demonstrated how the Indian laborers were swindled: to keep them forever in debt, the company sold them articles for work or home, or decorative trinkets on credit, at prices several times higher than in London. He showed an old one-barrel shotgun whose price in La Chorrera was forty-five shillings. To pay this amount a Huitoto or Bora would have had to work for two years, assuming that they were paid what a street sweeper earned in Iquitos. He showed them shirts of unbleached linen, coarse twill trousers, necklaces of colored beads, little boxes of powder, belts of pita fiber, toy tops, oil lamps, hats of untreated straw, ointments for bites, calling out the prices these objects might fetch in Britain. The eyes of the parliamentarians opened in indignation and astonishment. It was even worse when Sir Roger set out before Charles Roberts and the other members of the committee dozens of photographs he had taken himself in El Encanto, La Chorrera, and other stations in Putumayo: there were backs and buttocks with “the mark of Arana” in the form of scars and sores, the bitten and pecked-at corpses rotting in the undergrowth, the incredible emaciation of men, women, and children who in spite of their skeletal thinness carried on their heads great sausages of solidified rubber, the parasite-swollen bellies of newborns about to die. The photographs were an unassailable testimony to the condition of beings living almost without food and mistreated by greedy men whose only goal in life was to extract more rubber even if to do that entire villages had to be consumed by the exploitation.

An emotional aspect of the sessions was the questioning of the British directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company, when the Irishman Swift McNeill, the veteran parliamentarian for South Donegal, stood out for his pugnacity and subtlety. He proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that outstanding businessmen like Henry M. Read and John Russell Gubbins, stars of London society and aristocrats or independently wealthy men like Sir John Lister-Kaye and Baron de Sousa-Deiro, were totally uninformed about what went on in Arana’s company, whose board meetings they attended and whose proceedings they signed, collecting huge sums of money. Not even when Truth began publishing the denunciations made by Benjamín Saldaña Roca and Walter Hardenburg did they bother to find out how much truth lay in those accusations. They were content with the releases Abel Larco or Julio C. Arana himself gave them, which consisted of accusing the accusers of being blackmailers resentful at not having received from the company the money they attempted to extort by means of threats. No one bothered to verify on site if the enterprise to which they gave the prestige of their names was committing those crimes. Even worse, not one of them had taken the trouble to examine the papers, accounts, reports, and correspondence of a company whose files showed signs of those villainies. Because, as incredible as it might seem, until the scandal broke, Julio C. Arana, Abel Larco, and the other hierarchs felt so secure they did not hide traces of the outrages in their books: for example, not paying salaries to the indigenous laborers and spending enormous quantities of money to buy whips, revolvers, and rifles.

A moment of heightened drama occurred when Arana appeared to make a statement before the committee. His first appearance had to be postponed because his wife, Eleonora, who was in Geneva, suffered a nervous breakdown because of the tension in the life of her family, which after having climbed to the highest position, now saw its situation quickly disintegrating. Arana entered the House of Commons dressed with his usual elegance, and as pale as the malaria victims in Amazonia. He appeared surrounded by aides and advisers, but in the hearing room he was permitted to have only his lawyer with him. At first he seemed serene and arrogant. As questions from Charles Roberts and the elderly Swift McNeill kept cornering him, he began to fall into contradictions and make mistakes, which his translator went out of his way to moderate. He provoked laughter among the members of the public when, in response to a question from the head of the committee—why were there so many Winchester rifles on the Putumayo stations, for the correrías or attacks on the tribes in order to take people away to the rubber plantations?—he said: “No, señor, to defend themselves against the tigers that abound in the region.” He tried to deny everything but suddenly acknowledged that yes, it was true, he once had heard that an indigenous woman was burned alive. Except that was a long time ago. Abuses, if they had been committed, were always a thing of the past.

The greatest confusion for the rubber king occurred when he tried to disqualify the testimony of Walter Hardenburg, accusing the North American of having falsified a bill of exchange in Manaus. Swift McNeill interrupted to ask if he would dare call Hardenburg a counterfeiter to his face—it was believed he was living in Canada.

“Yes,” replied Arana.

“Do it then,” responded McNeill. “Here he is.”

The arrival of Hardenburg caused a commotion in the hearing room. Advised by his attorney, Arana retracted his statement and said he wasn’t accusing Hardenburg but “someone” of having cashed a bill in a Manaus bank that turned out to be counterfeit. Hardenburg demonstrated that it had been a trap to discredit him set by Arana’s company, using an individual with a criminal record named Julio Muriedas, who at present was in prison in Pará for fraud.

Arana collapsed following this episode. He gave only hesitant, confused answers to all the questions, betraying his uneasiness and especially the lack of veracity that was the most obvious feature of his testimony.

As the parliamentary committee was in the middle of its work, a new catastrophe crushed the entrepreneur. Judge Swinfen Eady, of the High Court of Justice, at the request of a group of stockholders, decreed an immediate halt to the business of the Peruvian Amazon Company. The judge stated that the company obtained benefits “from collecting rubber in the most awful manner imaginable” and that “if Mr. Arana did not know what was occurring, his responsibility was even more serious, since he, more than anyone, had the absolute obligation to know what went on in his domain.”

The final report of the parliamentary committee was no less lapidary. It concluded: “Mr. Julio C. Arana, like his associates, had knowledge of and therefore is the principal party responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by his agents and employees in Putumayo.”

When the committee made its report public, sealing the final discredit of Arana and ruining the empire that had made a rich and powerful man of this humble resident of Rioja, Roger had already begun to forget Amazonia and Putumayo. Irish issues had become his principal concern. After a short vacation, the Foreign Office proposed that he return to Brazil as the consul general in Rio de Janeiro, and at first he agreed. But he kept postponing his departure, and even though he gave the ministry and himself various pretexts for this, the truth was that in his heart he had already decided not to serve the British Crown again as a diplomat or in any other capacity. He wanted to make up for lost time, pour his intelligence and energy into fighting for what would be from now on the exclusive goal of his life: the emancipation of Ireland.

For that reason he followed from a distance, without too much interest, the final incarnations of the Peruvian Amazon Company and its owner. It had been made clear at the committee sessions during the confession of the general manager, Henry Lex Gielgud, that Arana’s enterprise did not possess any title of ownership to the lands of Putumayo and exploited them only “by right of occupation,” which increased the mistrust of the banks and other creditors. They immediately pressured its owner, demanding he satisfy all outstanding payments and commitments (his debts amounted to more than 250,000 pounds in City institutions alone). Threats of seizure and judicial auction of his goods rained down on him. Publicly protesting that, to save his honor, he would pay every last cent, Arana put up for sale his elegant London house on Kensington Road, his mansion in Biarritz, and his house in Geneva. But the money received from these sales was not sufficient to appease his creditors, who obtained judicial orders to freeze his savings and bank accounts in England. At the same time his personal fortune was disintegrating, the decline in his business continued to be unstoppable. The fall in the price of Amazonian rubber because of competition from Asia was parallel to the decision of many European and North American importers not to buy Peruvian rubber again until it was proved by an independent international commission that slave labor, torture, and attacks on the tribes had stopped, salaries were paid to the indigenous harvesters of latex, and the labor laws in effect in Britain and the United States were respected on the rubber stations.

There was no opportunity even to attempt to meet these demands. The flight of the principal overseers and chiefs of the stations in Putumayo, afraid of being imprisoned, threw the entire region into a state of absolute anarchy. Many Indians—entire communities—also took advantage of the situation to escape, which meant that the extraction of rubber was reduced to a minimum and soon ceased altogether. The fugitives left after pillaging stores and offices and taking everything valuable, principally weapons and foodstuffs. Then it was learned that the company, frightened at the possibility that those runaway killers might become prosecution witnesses in possible future trials, gave them large sums to facilitate their escape and buy their silence.

Roger followed the decay of Iquitos through letters from his friend George Michell, the British consul, who told him about the closing of hotels, restaurants, and shops where articles imported from Paris and New York had once been sold, how the champagne that previously had been uncorked with so much generosity disappeared as if by magic along with whiskey, cognac, port, and wine. In the taverns and brothels there was now only the brandy that scratched your throat and poisonous drinks of suspicious provenance, supposed aphrodisiacs that often, instead of inflaming sexual desire, had the effect of dynamite blasts in the stomachs of the unwary.

Just as in Manaus, the collapse of Casa Arana and rubber produced a general crisis in Iquitos as fast-moving as the prosperity the city had enjoyed for fifteen years. The first to emigrate were the foreigners—merchants, explorers, traffickers, tavern owners, professional people, technicians, prostitutes, pimps, and madams—who returned to their own countries and went in search of places more auspicious than this one, sinking into ruin and isolation.

Prostitution did not disappear, but it changed agents. Brazilian prostitutes vanished, along with those who said they were “French” and in reality were usually Poles, Flemings, Turks, or Italians, and were replaced by cholas and Indians, many of them girls and adolescents who had worked as domestics and lost their jobs because their employers had left in pursuit of more favorable winds or because, with the economic crisis, they could no longer dress or feed them. The British consul, in one of his letters, gave a pathetic description of little fifteen-year-old emaciated Indian girls strolling along the embankment in Iquitos, painted like clowns, looking for clients. Newspapers and magazines disappeared, even the weekly bulletin that announced the departure and arrival of ships, because river transport, once so intense, decreased until it almost stopped. The event that sealed the isolation of Iquitos, its break from the wider world with which it had such intense commerce for some fifteen years, was the decision of the Booth Line to gradually reduce traffic on its freight and passenger lines. When the movement of ships stopped completely, the umbilical cord that joined Iquitos to the world was cut. The capital of Loreto made a journey back in time. In a few years it again became a remote, forgotten town in the heart of the Amazonian plain.

One day in Dublin, Roger, who had gone to see a doctor about his arthritic pain, was crossing the damp grass on St. Stephen’s Green when he saw a Franciscan waving to him. It was one of the four—the worker-priests—who had gone to Putumayo to establish a mission. They sat on a bench to talk, near the pond with ducks and swans. Their experience had been very hard. The hostility they encountered in Iquitos from the authorities, who obeyed the orders of Arana’s company, did not drive them away—they had the help of the Augustinian fathers—and neither did the attacks of malaria or the insect bites that, during the first months in Putumayo, put their spirit of sacrifice to the test. In spite of the obstacles and mishaps, they managed to settle in the outskirts of El Encanto, in a hut similar to the ones the Huitotos built in their camps. Their relations with the indigenous people, after a beginning when the Indians were sullen and suspicious, had been good, even cordial. The four began to learn Huitoto and Bora and built a crude outdoor church with a roof of palm leaves over the altar. But suddenly the general flight of people of all kinds took place. Managers and employees, artisans and guards, Indian domestics and laborers were leaving as if they had been expelled by some malignant force or an epidemic of panic. When they were alone, the life of the four became more difficult every day. One of them, Father McKey, contracted beriberi. Then, after long discussions, they too chose to leave the place, which seemed to be the victim of a divine curse.

The return of the four was a Homeric journey and a via crucis. With the radical decrease in rubber exports and the disorder and depopulation of the stations, the only means of transport out of Putumayo, which were the ships of the Peruvian Amazon Company, especially the Liberal, were halted overnight, with no prior warning. That meant the four were cut off from the world, stranded in an abandoned place, with one of their number gravely ill. When Father McKey died, his companions buried him on a knoll and put an inscription on his grave in four languages: Gaelic, English, Huitoto, and Spanish. Then they left, having made no preparations. Some Indians helped them to sail in a pirogue down the Putumayo until it met with the Yavarí. On the long trip the lightweight boat capsized several times and they had to swim to shore. They lost the few possessions they had. On the Yavarí, after a long wait, a boat agreed to carry them to Manaus on condition they not occupy cabins. They slept on deck, and with the rains, the oldest of the three missionaries, Father O’Nety, came down with pneumonia. Finally in Manaus two weeks later, they found a Franciscan convent that took them in. There Father O’Nety died in spite of his companions’ care. He was buried in the convent cemetery. The two survivors, after recovering from their disastrous vicissitudes, were repatriated to Ireland. Now they had taken up again their labor among the industrial workers of Dublin.

Roger remained sitting for a long time under the leafy trees on St. Stephen’s Green. He tried to imagine what all that immense region of Putumayo would be like with the disappearance of the stations, the flight of the natives, the employees, guards, and killers of Arana’s company. Closing his eyes, he fantasized. Fecund nature would cover all the open spaces and clearings with bushes, lianas, underbrush, brambles, and when the forest was reborn, the animals would return to make their lairs. The place would be filled with the songs of birds, the whistles and grunts and shrieks of parrots, monkeys, serpents, capybara, curassows, and jaguars. With the rains and mud slides, in a few years there would be no trace of those camps where human greed and cruelty had caused so much suffering, so many mutilations and deaths. The wood in the buildings would rot in the rain and the houses would collapse, their wood devoured by termites. All kinds of creatures would make burrows and refuges in the debris. In a not very distant future, every trace of humans would have been erased by the jungle.