Dance of the Dwarfs (21 page)

At the same time Chucha has developed a wild gaiety. She reminds me of a child on its first visit to the seaside. Bucket and spade and impulsive kisses. It could be that she feels not only the joy of the rains but also the glorious freedom of her lover from all these weeks of idiocy. My job is to make a ton of wheat grow where now there is only one palatable tuft of grass for a bullock, not to dispute the forest with animals to which the Lord gave such outstanding power and beauty—though I can't say as much for their habits.

Somehow one expects the sun to be less fiery after the rain, but of course it is not. The llano steams. Chucha's garment dries to comparative respectability in twenty minutes. The mud crusts very quickly and can be treacherous as thin ice. I must ride up and see how far the marshes now extend to the north and what temporary streams are running into them. Seen from the Mother and Child I expect to find the llano all striped with blue and silver, for the water level must be too high to be hidden by the shallow folds.

The floods will soon go down and then be stationary for four months, fed by daily rains. I ought to make a swimming pool for Chucha on one of the minor soak-aways of the marsh. Or it could easily be done by damming the creek when the level is stabilized. Now, how on earth could I have written that? Proof of how swiftly one can throw off an obsession when the environment changes! To dam the creek is something which never must be allowed.

[
May 15, Sunday
]

It is time the government replaced Pedro. The Intendencia must know by now that he has vanished and ought to have sent someone along who could take my evidence. But, to be fair, why should they give a damn for a back end of beyond with ownerless cattle and ownerless men? Apart from the incalculable results of rotgut working on a horseman's pride—much as it did in sixteenth-century Europe—our life is peaceful, hostility between human beings being pointless when we are all isolated in a hostile environment. The Intendencia knows very well that we govern ourselves by mutual consent with a minimum of murder, and that any emergency will have settled itself long before uniforms and the law arrive.

Chucha and I set out early and rode up the east side of the marshes. The ground was too soft for her to come to any harm, so I let her have her first all-out gallop. Estrellera easily beat Pichón over five furlongs and showed a lady-like pride. Chucha, the darling, was ecstatic.

The marshes have not broadened as much as I expected, but the water has inundated three or four miles along the line of a slight depression which was hardly perceptible in the drought. From the Mother and Child we saw four llaneros riding round the head of the flood, their course marked by white flecks of water from the pools instead of eddies of dust. As soon as they sighted us, they galloped towards us. They were Alvar, Arnoldo—in his capacity of temporary headman—a fellow called Vicente who was a particular friend of Pedro's and a fourth who rides the country far beyond Santa Eulalia and is only known to me by sight.

They greeted us with proper solemnity and were particularly formal with Chucha who has acquired my social status. These indispensable ceremonies over, they were eager to know if I had seen any other riders and burst into their story. Vicente told it; Arnoldo threw in a few proverbs from time to time; and Alvar cursed.

On Friday morning at the height of the storm three guerrilleros in the usual jeep, bristling with arms, had splashed into Santa Eulalia and taken refuge under the first solid thatch they came to. The men were all out on the llano, weather or no weather, riding round the frightened herds, and there was hardly anybody in the settlement but the women and Arnoldo. Arnoldo made the unwelcome visitors as comfortable as he could and continued his work—a marked discourtesy—pretending that he did not know who they were.

When the men and horses, sodden and cold, began to drift in at dusk, they did not dismount and surrounded the jeep. I suppose there were about a dozen of them, upright in the saddle, patient as Indians, watching with the veiled eyes of ceremonious killers. The partisans demanded cattle. According to Vicente, none of the llaneros had replied, either refusing or accepting. It must have been obvious to the jeep party that these were men of a different breed from their submissive mountain peasants, and that bloodshed meant nothing to them.

The guerrilleros quickly regained the jeep. With all that firepower concentrated on their semicircle, the llaneros had at least to produce some words. They agreed to drive another bunch of cattle to the foothills of the Cordillera, though they had no intention whatever of doing so. Machine-gunning from the air had put more fear of God and the government into them than a hundred men on the ground.

Moreover, Alvar said, these fatherless bandits were men of education, well spoken. That puzzled him. It doesn't puzzle me. The bastards, as he rightly called them, are enjoying themselves. They think the eyes of history are on them. Many are law students or unemployable lawyers; so they like playing at soldiers. I hope to live to see the day when soldiers like playing at being lawyers.

They must have eaten the villages out of house and home and become very short of rations, for they were taking big risks besides gambling against the meteorological reports. They may have thought that open llano was always open llano and they could of course be confident—after their punitive expeditions against remote villages in the Cordillera—that knives and the odd lance were not much use against machine pistols.

They dossed down, two sleeping and one on guard, in front of the ashes of Pedro's place—a position from which they could cover all four tracks of Santa Eulalia. At dawn on Saturday there was still no sign of a break in the downpour, and it looked as if the whole settlement was about to slide down the gentle slope into the Guaviare. They were in a filthy temper and decided to get out quick. They swore to return and burn the place down if the cattle were not delivered on time.

Two miles out they tried to ford a yellow torrent and stuck fast. They hauled out the jeep backwards, found a likelier crossing and stuck again. God wished the jeep to remain there, Arnoldo said, and remain there it did. All that could be seen of it was one wheel cocked up in a slope of mud.

But God had failed to foresee the consequences. The three, furious and with mud running off them in streams, had marched back and demanded horses. This would have been perfectly acceptable in any large estancia, but not in Santa Eulalia where a man had no possessions but his horse and saddle. Cattle, all right. Women, well, there might be one or two who would consider it an honor. But horses, no!

They took what they wanted, three horses and three remounts. It turned out that they actually needed less, for their leader was neatly spitted on a long lance. The gallant llanero at the butt end was turned into a fountain. They wrote a cross on him with their guns, Alvar said. After that, resistance was hopeless.

The sun was now out again and steaming the mud. The guerrilleros coolly dried themselves, commandeered what food they could lay their hands on and rode off leading their two spare horses in the late afternoon. Before dusk five llaneros followed hard on their tracks, careful to stay out of sight. They hoped to be able to close in with the twilight when their steel would have a chance against automatic weapons. Alternative tactics would be to creep up when the two men camped for the night, cut the horses loose and round them up at leisure. A number of unpleasant things could happen to the pursued if they had to make their way back to the Cordillera on foot.

The two guerrilleros followed the forest belt along the Guaviare. Since the more open space they had for their weapons, the more unassailable they would be, this route was unexpected. The llaneros, cleverly using the folds and skylines which only they could recognize, watched them unsaddle and tether the horses. When darkness came down, they closed in on foot. They found the temporary camp all right, and nothing on the ground but horse dung.

They were innocent, of course. They seemed to have assumed that no men were as valiant and cunning as themselves. They did not realize that these veterans, though knowing comparatively little of horses and the lay of the land, had been hunted for years by experienced, well-armed enemies and were fully capable of foreseeing what the llaneros were likely to do before the honest souls thought of it themselves.

The pursuers had wasted a lot of time but still had a trick in hand. Hoofprints were distinguished with fingers and matches and established that the four horses had quietly moved on westwards. That meant that sooner or later the guerrilleros would be stopped by the lower reaches of the creek. They could not possibly cross it, so they would have to follow it up and go round the north of the marshes.

Four of the llaneros then struck straight across the grass through the night in order to intercept them. The fifth stayed on the edge of the forest as his horse was finished. A shameful failure in their ordinary daily life. Their horses, though they always look thin and un-groomed and are often saddlesore, can endure anything. But this one, which its owner had had to grab in a hurry, had been weakened by a vampire bat the night before.

The four, when we met them, had found no hoofprints north of the marsh and were sure that the guerrilleros were still in the Guaviare forest belt. I said that I doubted it. They knew of the existence of creek and marshes as well as the llaneros did. If they wanted to break contact, they could have followed the forest for a mile or two and then ridden off into the blue. It did not much matter where they found themselves at sunrise. They had only to put it at their backs and go on.

Alvar, who had lost his own reliable mount to them, would not have it. If they had got that far ahead they would kill their horses, he said furiously, at the pace they were going. I don't suppose they cared. Assuming their jeep was the same as I saw at the estancia, it had a two-way radio in it. Before they abandoned the vehicle they could have called up guerrilla headquarters and reported their intention. Thus, if they could only keep their lead for another day, a party might come out to pick them up.

The four swept off their hats, thanking us for our sympathy and help—though we could give none—and paced on to the west.

Chucha has revised her opinion of revolutionaries. Why do idealists have to kill people, she wants to know. I forget the exact words she used. Idealist is not in her vocabulary. It is extraordinary how we can communicate in depth on any subject, even mildly technical subjects, with language which is really only fit to ask for a banana.

[
May 16, Monday
]

We tried to plow too soon and broke a tine of the cultivator on new ground outside the walls. The water had poured off, soaking in a mere three inches and leaving the soil rock hard beneath. I must remember that if I am here next year.

If I am here. I long to be. That would solve so many problems. But it is highly improbable. Both my director and the government, when they know everything, will insist that this is a lunatic choice for an experimental station. If only I had someone to talk to! This goes round and round in circles. I am obsessed with Chucha. It isn't only our exquisite incontinence. I swear I should still cherish her simplicity and grace and youth if she or I were impotent. There is only one word to describe what I feel for her, and I cannot and will not face it.

Oh God! Back to broken ironmongery and mustelids. They may settle the issue yet.

I rode into Santa Eulalia with the two halves of the tine knowing that if Arnoldo had them for a model he could laboriously forge another. I found the men, dark-faced, standing by their horses in the plaza. They told me there had been another murder by the partisans, who had brutally cut the throat of that unfortunate llanero left behind with his exhausted horse.

The other four had returned home early this morning, having given up the chase as hopeless. They found that their companion—Jacinto, his name was—had not come in, though he could easily have walked the distance in three hours. They rode out to meet him, and caught his hobbled horse far out on the llano. Jacinto was where they had left him, lying on a bed of dry leaves with his throat cut.

I had to go to his house, view the body they had brought in and speak the nothings of convention to his weeping Indian wife. What happens to the widows? Where do they go and how do they live? I glanced at the unpleasant sight and then looked more carefully. I asked Alvar—sure to be experienced in such matters—whether he had seen many men before with gaping throats.

“Two, or it could be three. It is not,” he added apologetically, “a very rare occurrence.”

“Didn't the killer usually do a neater job?”

“I believe it! But what can you expect of these sons of whores? They cannot even handle a knife like a gentleman.”

“Was there much blood?”

“It seemed to me little. But leaves are more thirsty than the ground. And there had been rain in the night.”

I embarked cautiously on the forbidden subject.

“Have you always grazed cattle along the belt of the Guaviare?”

“Without a care!”

“Jaguar?”

“None! There is no game left for them to eat. We had not always such a lack of powder and shot as there is now.”

“Could there be other hunters?”

“Not a thought! You know where those live better than any of us.”

I asked him what tracks they had seen. Unfortunately they had taken murder for granted and had pretty well ignored tracks. Jacinto had been sleeping just inside a grove of ceibas, on the same spot where the two fugitives with their four horses had pretended to be about to camp. Naturally there were prints of feet and hooves all over the place. It was difficult to judge which had been made before the killing and which afterwards, especially as there had been a short, violent storm in the night, turning the grove into an island. What was clear was the indentation of two knees on the leaves where the supposed murderer had knelt to cut Jacinto's throat while he was sleeping.