Dance of the Dwarfs

Dance of the Dwarfs

Geoffrey Household

Preface

IT WILL be remembered that the death of Dr. Owen Dawnay was attributed to partisans of the Colombian National Liberation Army. The evidence of his only neighbors, a few families of squatters and masterless cattlemen, appeared conclusive. They had been terrorized into supplying cattle to guerrilla headquarters in the foothills of the Cordillera. Two of them had been brutally murdered. The headman of their village had disappeared. Dawnay himself was known to have been threatened.

That a guerrilla detachment did indeed visit Dawnay's experimental station about the time of his death is certain. His arms, his official journal and all his papers were stolen. The main gate had been forced, and the tracks of a jeep were plainly to be seen in the compound. The Colombian government and the Ministry of Overseas Development had every reason to suppose that he had been executed for refusing to collaborate with the revolutionaries.

Dawnay's choice of an agricultural station in that remote corner where the great grasslands, or llanos, at last disappear under tropical forest, largely untraveled, was scientifically sound, but may have owed still more to his personal tastes. Born and bred in the south of Argentina, he was a superb horseman and an excellent shot with gun or rifle. Undoubtedly he enjoyed the primitive conditions of his life and the still more primitive society of llaneros in which he found himself.

His supreme self-confidence often inclined him to be impatient with what he considered unnecessary anxiety. His silence therefore aroused little concern, especially since the pilot of the government canoe which had called at Santa Eulalia on May 2, 1966, reported that he was in the best of health and spirits. Another month was allowed to go by before a light aircraft was dispatched to his station with mail, supplies and two administrators of the Intendencia.

His house was a scene of utter desolation. Fungi were growing in the rooms and wasps building under the eaves. Shut in a larger inner room were the carcasses of two horses which had died from starvation and lack of water. Dawnay's two servants had vanished, perhaps liquidated as the only witnesses to the murder, perhaps panic-stricken.

The compound, which had been intensively cultivated, was turned into rank jungle by the rains. Hidden by the vegetation were the skeletons of Dr. Dawnay and a young female. Birds and insects had picked them clean. Poinsettia and a twisted citrus sapling were growing through the bones. Both appeared to have been shot. The position of the bodies suggested that the executioners, with macabre sentimentality, had permitted the pair to die in each other's arms.

Though Dawnay was only thirty-three, his great promise in his own field of research was internationally recognized. As a man, he was known and loved by a host of Latin American friends in Colombia and Argentina. His death therefore aroused a storm of indignation against Cuban-financed revolutionaries. This bitterly hostile publicity may have accounted for the mysterious reappearance of his papers.

In November 1966 a black, insect-proof, metal box bearing Dawnay's initials was delivered to the publishers of his fascinating monograph
Fodder Plants of the New World
. It contained the missing journal as well as this unexpected personal diary, which was in his handwriting and undoubtedly genuine.

The motive of the anonymous senders may be inferred. Unable to clear themselves of the brutal murder of a man whom in fact they seem to have admired, they realized that the diary supplied a complete answer to the accusation against them. It seems probable that, after examining his correspondence, they found no other trustworthy address—such as that of a firm of solicitors or a learned body—and therefore chose to return the box to Dawnay's publishers, rejecting the Agricultural Mission itself as insufficiently neutral.

The unfinished entry of May 18, which must have remained on his desk until the partisans recovered it, was discolored and spotted by damp, but still decipherable. A note in Spanish had been added:

We found no weapon by the bodies. It is to be supposed that he rushed to the door to confirm that his anxiety was needless, and saw what was behind her. There was no time to go back for steel or gun, so he went on bare-handed; and whether she was alive or dead when he took her in his arms we do not know
.

The Diary of Dr. Owen Dawnay

[
March 9, Wednesday
]

I HAVE recently noticed a tendency to talk to myself. One-sided conversation is humiliating and settles nothing. It is exclamatory. It points at things which are worth remembering, but does not commit them to memory. That is my reason for starting a diary. I want to marshal the facts of my relationship to my environment and compel myself to think about them.

I also need to be able to turn back time and feel what sort of person I was two or three months before. In that way I shall spot any inclination to become a work hermit or to exaggerate this background sense of insecurity—well, not exactly of insecurity but of something unfinished—which I am unable to analyze. I suppose all missionaries suffer from the same questioning of the self.

It amuses Santa Eulalia when I describe myself as a missionary. They have nicknamed me El Misionero. But a field agronomist of the British Tropical Agricultural Mission is surely a missionary. My bishop and archdeacon sit in Bogotá, their chapel being an air-conditioned office and their altar a laboratory. I, since I am a fair horseman and bilingual in Spanish and English, was sent abroad to preach the gospel—or rather practice it—between the rivers Guaviare and Vichada.

I chose the site myself. The others didn't know enough to argue. I thought at first that my chief objective should be testing the right varieties of cereals. I now see that the primeval problem of agriculture—when to plant—is far more important. The dry season normally begins at the end of December. This year we have had no rain at all since December 3. But provided God is a good man, as they say, one can grow practically anything in half the time it takes anywhere else. This is the no man's land between savannah and forest: the last, forgotten, blind alley of grass. To the west and south it is bounded by darkness. To the north the llanos spread out towards Venezuela, empty under the blazing sun.

A perfect experimental station. It was never my intention nor that of the Mission that I should be alone on it; but in practice I found that assistants only increased my responsibilities. I settled in four months ago accompanied by a most friendly Colombian and a young Minnesota Swede from the Peace Corps. I am not sure what qualities he was supposed to have, but it was only too clear that training by a war corps would have been more to the point. Estrellera threw him into the creek. He missed deliberately when shooting for the pot. Then he broke out in boils and was absurdly horrified when I wanted him to try Joaquín's efficacious herbal remedies. I admit that Joaquín produces his pastes by chewing rather than pestle and mortar, but saliva is a disinfectant.

So I had him flown out. My other young friend went along to look after him, promising a swift return. I shall not see him again, which is a pity, for he was a qualified botanist and I am not. But he preferred the problems of classification and the pleasure of dictating his results to an obliging secretary after hours. The girl either wore no bra at all or had some compensating device of elastic hitherto unknown to me. I regret that I was always too busy for detailed investigation. When I return to Bogotá, I shall make a point of satisfying my curiosity.

[
March 10, Thursday
]

I don't seem to have got very far yesterday evening. I rode straight at my blank page and then began to passage sideways like Tesoro when he mistakes a barred shadow for a snake. I started off to analyze the sense of the unfinished, dabbled in the bras of Bogotá and then strolled out to the corral to see the horses. Because I wanted company or because I have recently become uneasy about them?

Certainly Tesoro and Estrellera were very glad to see me. They always are. The horse's capacity for affection never fails to surprise me. A rather stupid, nervous creature, full of love. Like some primitive, laborious Roman slave taking to Christianity when it first appeared.

During the last ten days or so they have had fits of restlessness at night; they are near enough—physically and telepathically—to be able to communicate it. They need not worry. The adobe walls of the corral are still fairly perpendicular, and jaguar on the open llano is most unlikely. Still, one must not assume that two trusted friends are liars.

Leaving out mere nuisances, such as insects and occasional slight fevers, there is less here to be afraid of than in London. On the edge of the forest one could conceivably be in trouble with a very rash or very hungry jaguar, but the risk is less than that of being charged by a drunken driver whom unfortunately one is not allowed to shoot. You could be caught on foot by wild cattle, but you take the same care not to be as you take crossing Oxford Street in the rush hour. You could be bitten by a snake, but that is hardly more likely than electrocuting yourself among the infinite dangers of a modern flat, a paralysis for which there is no serum. I have two phials. Alternatively, I could do worse than put my trust in Joaquín whose concoction of dried venom sacs and gallbladders is reinforced by his confident bedside manner. No, the greatest danger is man just as anywhere else. A band of poor, half-starved devils of the National Liberation Army occupies the wild foothills of the Cordillera, some four days hard riding to the northwest. These guerrilleros must know of my existence, and so I presume they think me harmless. As for my other neighbors, the llaneros of Santa Eulalia, we are on most cordial terms drunk or sober.

Thus physical danger may be ruled out in my search for an influence to fill what I call the blank spot. A too imaginative curiosity due to loneliness? Well, I am not all that lonely and I am neither superstitious nor skeptical. If duendes exist, as Joaquín insists they do, I am eager to meet a specimen illusion, for one cannot begin to explain until one has experienced. I play with the speculation that, just as the collective hysteria of a crowd can persuade it to see angels or flying saucers, so the rampant, hourly visible growth of the forest might produce a communal spirit, a vegetable emanation which could be detected by animal senses. Harness the green power and what green fingers it could give to an agronomist! Duende is a more comprehensive name than our ghost or elemental.

Then the house itself? But I enjoy its solidity in so much emptiness. It is a deserted estancia dating from colonial days, built square and defensible like a legionary fort. I find in it the peace of some forgotten patio where others walked and were content. On the south side are a few still-habitable, dilapidated rooms of the boss's house in which I camp. On the north are the peons' quarters: a row of ruinous shacks hung with the black combs of wasps' nests where the shade of wall and roof has encouraged a rank growth of weak lianas. These two sides of the square are joined by adobe walls a couple of hundred yards long, so that a space of some two and a half acres is enclosed. This was originally intended to provide food for the small community and is irrigated by tiled channels, barred where they pass under the walls, drawing water from the marshes to the north.

The marshes? Well, all marshes are mysterious in the half-light of dawn or dusk when the wildfowl chuckle and the canes and rushes, disturbed at their roots by some eel or amphibian, seem to swing away from the passage of the invisible. The creek which takes the overflow passes close to the estancia and runs south to an unknown confluence with the Guaviare. Two miles beyond the creek is the blue wall of the forest which I find neither friendly nor unfriendly. It is simply an overpowering fact of the planet: a barrier like the sea with its own specialized life and methods of travel.

It seems to be either forest or creek which upsets the horses. Last week I walked as far as the water's edge to see if I could spot puma on the llano or an anaconda watching the shallows where peccary or tapir might be drinking—though I believe they never come so far from the trees. I was only aware of star-lit silence, emphasized by the whine of the mosquitoes. This silence itself sometimes produces a feeling of awe, a prickling of the scalp. So I cannot definitely say that I was uneasy. I did perhaps feel that I was observed. Hostile? No. For the moment a neutral observer like myself.

[
March 12, Saturday
]

I have come to the conclusion that the blank spot is due neither to me nor to this essentially welcoming country which waits to be inhabited. The thing which is unfinished is in the collective mind of my companions. So I will try to dissect them as individuals and see if description forces me into clear thinking.

Our isolation is sufficiently complete to eliminate all outside influences. Now that a man can take a package tour to Antarctica and cross the Sahara in his own car, the immense plains of Colombia and Venezuela and the tropical forest which forms their southern boundary must be the last expanse of world to be left as it was. In the llanos there is nothing unknown or unexplored; they are merely empty and their life has hardly changed in four hundred years. The forest, too, is known in the sense that all navigable rivers are navigated and that here and there some prospector, rubber collector or deliberate explorer has crossed by land from one river to another; but what he could see on low ground was limited to a hundred yards on either side, and on high ground to the world of the treetops. One assumes that the fauna, the flora and the floor of leaf mold are always the same. It is, I think, a very large assumption. I have plenty of evidence pointing to rapid differentiation of species. But that is for my journal, not this diary.

I have found the Intendencia, which administers this territory, vaguely benevolent, but it does not greatly affect our lives. There are regular air services to Puerto Ayacucho and to San José del Guaviare; but one is five hundred miles away and the other a mere clump of huts to be reached eventually by canoe if a canoe is available. There is also the occasional plane to Colombia's Amazonas province. It will come down on the Guaviare at Santa Eulalia if I can advise the Mission that I need it.

A big “if.” When I decided on my station, the Government—after trying its best to convince me that it was too isolated for what they called a cultured European—told me that at least I should have excellent communications with Bogotá, and like a fool I believed both Pedro and them.

This excellent communication is a transmitter upon which Pedro, by violently pedaling a generator, can painfully tap out a message in Morse. He gets it three-quarters right when sober, but invariably transcribes the reply wrong. One can also send a letter or telegram by any launch going up river to the edge of civilization and be assured that it will reach a post office in a week or two.

I suppose I ought to have a radio station of my own, but I do not want to make too many demands when both the Mission and the Government have been generous already. And I really cannot spare the time to take a short course and learn to handle the thing.

Entirely responsible for my presence here are Mario and his wife Teresa. In my tentative botanical explorations of the meeting of forest and llano I came upon this estancia and observed that Mario, then living in a solid shack built into the debris of the peons' cabins, had created a kitchen garden and was not only growing melons, beans and pimientos but selling them. Bartering would better describe his complicated half-and-half transactions.

I was instantly impressed by this proud agriculturalist among carnivorous llaneros who only dismount to eat and sleep and Indians who scratch the soil for subsistence. I had found my assistant and adviser who at the same time was a caretaker of empty rooms and had a wife to cook and clean.

And for my purposes the place was perfect, allowing me to experiment with wheats and fodders, and with rice around the outlet of the marshes. Most of the known food plants of tropical America can easily be cultivated, as well as a number of unknown collected from the edge of the forest—which I shall find disappointingly cataloged when I return to London in a couple of years.

Mario has the thick, smooth body of the Indian and the mobile, furrowed face of a Spanish peasant. A throwback. He can have little Spanish blood. He understands what I am doing and talks of remaking the Garden of Eden. On the strength of half a dozen Bible stories for children he considers himself a gallant Catholic. There is no church within a hundred miles, but I hear that a priest has been known to visit Santa Eulalia to solemnize marriages and baptize children.

Teresa—well, what is Teresa? Gentle, brown, with deep, sagging wrinkles and dirty, pendulous breasts. A caricature of the female body, though she cannot yet be forty. She bore three boys in her teens and accepts that she is unlikely to see any of them again: simple laborers vanished into the continent. Every man to her is a son. My clothes are crudely mended. My tastes are studied so far as raw material permits. There is plenty of room for culinary experiment even if most food is grilled over the ashes or stewed in a black pot.

She came up as a girl from Brazil and speaks a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish. She cannot describe how she came or why. None of the forest people has much idea of geography. Any long journey is up and down rivers, and by the time you reach your destination you may have traveled to every point of the compass. Thus the mental map of anyone who cannot read a printed map is very odd indeed. If the sense of locality belonging to a million fish could be compounded into one brain, it would be somewhere near Teresa's picture of her world.

The llaneros of course have a normal picture. Their horizon may be bounded by the precipice of the forest, by high stands of rushes or by a flickering of palms in the haze, but it is usually circular. The sun moves unclouded. East and west are fixed. Few llaneros can read, but all can understand a map—since their world is flat—and can mark accurately vegetation which might be of interest to me.

The next individual in order of importance is Pedro, the headman of Santa Eulalia, who represents Government in that he has stamps to sell to anyone who can write a letter. He has authority to arrest—though he has no prison—and to commandeer river transport which means an Indian and a canoe. He also keeps the village store and some pigs. When he kills one, I have to buy pork for the sake of his goodwill but often bury it as unfit to eat. It is unnecessary to swear Teresa to silence. Her manners are courtly by nature.