I would also like to say something else, unrelated to the theme of this toast. Although our insignificance means we can’t be spokespeople for such a noble cause, we believe, and after this journey more firmly than ever, that the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictional. We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographical similarities. And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America.
My oratory offering was received with great applause. The party, consisting in these parts of drinking as much alcohol as possible, continued until three in the morning, when we finally called it a day.
On Sunday morning we visited a tribe of Yaguas, the Indians of the red straw. After a 30-minute walk along a path, disproving all rumors of dense, impenetrable jungle, we reached a group of huts where a family lived. Their way of living was fascinating — outside, beneath wooden planks and with tiny, hermetic palm frond huts to shelter in at night from the mosquitoes that attack in close formation. The women had abandoned traditional costume for ordinary clothes so you couldn’t admire their jugs. The kids have distended bellies and are rather scrawny but the older people show no signs of vitamin deficiency, in contrast with its rate among more developed people living in the jungle. Their basic diet consists of yucca, bananas and palm fruit, mixed with the animals they hunt with rifles. Their teeth are totally rotten. They speak their own dialect but some of them understand Spanish.
In the afternoon we played football and though I played better they got a sneaky goal past me. That night Alberto woke me with an acute stomach pain, which later was located in the right iliac cavity; I was too exhausted to preoccupy myself with someone else’s strange aches so I advised him to resign himself to the pain, turned over and slept through till the next day.
Monday, the day medicine is distributed throughout the compound. Alberto, well cared for by his dear Mother Margarita, was receiving penicillin religiously every four hours. Dr. Bresciani told me he was waiting for a raft to arrive with some animals, and that we could take some planks and make a small raft of our own. The idea inspired us and we started making plans to go to Manaos, etc. I had an infected foot, so I missed the afternoon game and instead chatted with Dr. Bresciani about everything imaginable and fell into bed very late.
Tuesday morning, with Alberto fully recovered, we went to the compound where Dr. Montoya had operated on the ulna in a leprous nervous system with apparently brilliant results, although the technique left much to be desired. We went to fish in the afternoon in a nearby lagoon, and caught nothing, of course; but on the way back I determined to swim across the Amazon. It took me nearly two hours to the great despair of Dr. Montoya who had no desire to wait so long. That night there was a jovial little party, ending in a serious fight with Señor Lezama Beltrán, an immature, introverted soul who was probably a pervert as well. The poor man was drunk and irate because he had not been invited to the party, so he started shouting insults and raving until someone punched him in the eye and gave him a beating as well. The episode upset us a little because the poor man, apart from being homosexual and a first-rate bore, had been very nice to us, giving us 10 soles each, bringing our total to 479 for me and 163½ to Alberto.
Wednesday dawned with rain, so we didn’t go to the compound and the day was generally wasted. I read some García Lorca, and we went to see the raft tying up at the jetty. On Thursday morning, the day the medical staff have off, we went with Dr. Montoya to the opposite bank to buy food. We traveled down a branch of the Amazon, bought papayas, yucca, maize, fish, sugarcane at incredibly cheap prices, and fished a little. Montoya caught a regular fish and I got a mota. Coming back, a strong wind stirred up the river and the captain, Roger Álvarez, nearly wet his pants as the waves flooded his canoe. I asked for the rudder but he refused to give it to me and we went to the bank to wait for the river to calm down. Not until three in the afternoon did we get home. We cooked the fish but it didn’t fully satisfy our hunger. Roger gave each of us a shirt and me a pair of pants, so my spiritual well-being improved.
The raft was almost ready, only needing oars. That night an assembly of the colony’s patients gave us a farewell serenade, with lots of local songs sung by a blind man. The orchestra was made up of a flute player, a guitarist and an accordion player with almost no fingers, and a “healthy” contingent helping out with a saxophone, a guitar and some percussion. After that came the time for speeches, in which four patients spoke as well as they could, a little awkwardly. One of them froze, unable to go on, until out of desperation he shouted, “Three cheers for the doctors!” Afterwards, Alberto thanked them warmly for their welcome, saying that Peru’s natural beauty could not compare with the emotional beauty of this moment, that he had been deeply touched, that he could say no more except… and here he extended his arms with Perón-like gesture and intonation, “I want to give my thanks to all of you.”
The patients cast off and to the sound of a folk tune the human cargo drifted away from shore; the tenuous light of their lanterns giving the people a ghostly quality. We went to Dr. Bresciani’s house for a few drinks, and after chatting for a while, to bed.
Friday was our day of departure, so in the morning we paid a farewell visit to the patients and, after taking a few photos, came back carrying two fine pineapples, a gift from Dr. Montoya. We bathed and ate, and close to three in the afternoon began to say our goodbyes. At half past three our raft, christened the Mambo-Tango, set off downstream carrying a crew of both of us, and also for a while Dr. Bresciani, Alfaro and Chávez who built the raft.
They took us out into the middle of the river and left us to fend for ourselves.
LA KONTIKITA SE REVELA
debut for the little kontiki
Two or three mosquitoes alone could not beat my desire to sleep and within a few minutes it had defeated them. My triumph was empty, however, as Alberto’s voice shook me from my delicious state of limbo. The faint lights of a little town, which from its appearance had to be Leticia, could be seen on the left bank of the river. What followed was the hugely arduous task of directing the raft toward the lights, and in this, we met with disaster: the contraption refused to go anywhere near the bank; intransigent, it was determined to set its own course down the middle of the river. We rowed at full strength and just when it seemed we were definitely on our way, we’d turn a half circle and head back into midstream. We watched with growing desperation as the lights drifted into the distance. Exhausted, we decided that at least we could win the fight against the mosquitoes and sleep peacefully until dawn, deciding what to do then. Our prospects were not very promising. If we continued down river we’d have to go as far as Manaos, a long way according to more or less reliable information, some 10 days’ sailing. Due to an accident the day before, we didn’t have any more fishing hooks, nor any great quantities of essential provisions, and we weren’t sure we could make it to the bank when we wanted to. Not to mention the fact that we’d entered Brazil without our papers in order and couldn’t speak the language… But these concerns didn’t worry us for too long, because very quickly we fell into a deep sleep. The rising sun woke me and I crawled out from under the mosquito net to determine our position. With the world’s worst intentions, our little Kontiki had deposited itself on the right bank of the river, and was calmly waiting at a kind of little jetty belonging to a nearby house. I decided to put off inspecting things until later because the mosquitoes were still within eating range and were enjoying their feast. Alberto was sleeping deeply so I thought I’d join him and do the same. A morbid fatigue and an uneasy exhaustion overwhelmed me. I felt incapable of making any decision but clung to the thought that no matter how bad things became, there was no reason to suppose we couldn’t handle it.
QUERIDA VIEJA
dear mama
Bogotá, Colombia
July 6, 1952
Dear Ma
ma,
Here I am; my travels have taken me a few kilometers closer to Venezuela and made me a few pesos poorer. First, let me wish you the important happy birthday; I hope it was spent with love, laughter and the family. Next, I’ll be organized and give you a concise account of my adventures since we left Iquitos. We set off more or less according to plan; traveling for two nights with our loyal retinue of mosquitoes and arriving in the San Pablo colony at dawn, where we obtained accommodation. The medical director, a marvellous guy, liked us immediately and we got on well with the whole colony generally, except the nuns who questioned why we never went to mass. These nuns ran the place and those who didn’t attend mass had their rations reduced (we went without, but the kids there helped us and found us food every day). Apart from this minor cold war, life was incredibly pleasant. On the 14th, they gave me a party with lots of pisco, a kind of gin which makes you wonderfully drunk. The director of the colony toasted us and, inspired by the booze, I replied with a quintessentially Pan-American speech, winning great applause from the notable, and notably drunk, audience. We stayed a bit longer than planned, but finally left for Colombia. On the last night, a group of patients came over from the colony in a large canoe; they sang us farewell serenades on the jetty and made some very touching speeches. Alberto, who believes he is Perón’s natural heir, delivered such an impressive, demagogic speech that our well-wishers were convulsed with laughter. It was one of the most interesting experiences of our trip. An accordion player who had no fingers on his right hand used little sticks tied to his wrist; the singer was blind; and almost all the others were horribly deformed, due to the nervous form of the disease very common in this area. With light from the lamps and the lanterns reflected in the river, it was like a scene from a horror movie. The place is lovely, surrounded completely by jungle, with indigenous tribes barely a mile away (whom we visited, of course), and a lot of fish and game to eat and incalculable potential wealth; all of this set us dreaming of crossing the Mato Grosso by river, from Paraguay to the Amazon, practising medicine along the way, and so on… a dream kind of like having your own home… perhaps one day… We were feeling more like authentic explorers and set sail downstream on a luxury raft they built especially for us. The first day went smoothly but that night, instead of keeping watch as we should have done, we both settled down to sleep, comfortably protected by a mosquito net we’d been given, and woke up the next morning to find we’d run aground on the riverbank.
We ate like sharks. That day passed cheerfully and we decided to take turns at keeping watch, by the hour, to avoid any more problems, since at dusk the current had carried us toward the bank and some half-submerged branches nearly caused the raft to capsize. I earned a demerit point during one of my watches, when one of the hens we were taking to eat fell into the river and the current swept it away. The man who had swum the full width of the river in San Pablo didn’t have the courage to dive in after it, partly because we’d seen alligators surfacing every now and then, and partly because I’ve never really overcome my fear of water at night. If you’d been there you would have pulled it out and saved the chicken, so would Ana María, since you don’t have ridiculous nighttime complexes like me.
One of our hooks caught the most enormous fish and we had a hard time hauling it on board. We kept watch till morning, when we moored at the bank and then crawled under the mosquito net, as there were particularly vicious mosquitoes about. After a good sleep, Alberto, who prefers fish to chicken, discovered our two baited hooks had vanished during the night, which put him in an even fouler mood. As there was a house nearby, we decided to find out how far it was to Leticia. When the owner told us in formal Portuguese that Leticia was seven hours upstream and that we were now in Brazil, Alberto and I had a furious argument over who had fallen asleep on watch. But this got us nowhere. We gave the owner the fish and a pineapple weighing about four kilos given to us by the lepers and stayed overnight in his house, before he took us up-river again. The return trip was quite fast, but hard work because we had to row for at least seven hours in a canoe and we weren’t used to it. We found board and lodging, etc., at the police station in Leticia; but we couldn’t get more than 50 percent off our airfares, and had to fork out 130 Colombian pesos, plus another 15 for excess baggage, making a total of 1,500 Argentine pesos in all. But what saved the day was that we were asked to coach a football team while waiting for the plane, which came only once a fortnight. At first, we only intended to coach them to the point where they wouldn’t make fools of themselves; but they were so bad we decided to play, too. The amazing result was that what was considered the weakest team entered the one-day championship utterly reorganized, made it to the final and lost only on penalties. Alberto looked vaguely like Pedernera* with his spot-on passes, so he was nicknamed Pedernerita, in fact, and I saved a penalty which will go down in the history of Leticia. The whole celebration would have been great if they hadn’t played the Colombian national anthem at the end and I hadn’t bent down to wipe some blood off my knee during it, sparking a violent reaction from the colonel, who shouted at me. I was just on the edge of shouting back when I remembered our journey, etc., and bit my tongue. After a great flight in a cocktail-shaker of an airplane, we arrived in Bogotá. Alberto chatted to the other passengers on the way, recounting an awful flight we’d had across the Atlantic once when attending an international leprosy conference in Paris, and how three of the four engines had failed and we’d been within minutes of crashing into the Atlantic, concluding with, “Honestly, these Douglases…”; he was so convincing I was even scared myself.
We feel like we’ve been around the world twice. Our first day in Bogotá went pretty well, we found food on the university campus but no accommodation because it was full of students on grants for courses organized by the United Nations. No Argentines, of course. Just after one in the morning we finally found space at the hospital, by which I mean a chair to spend the night in. We’re not terribly poor, but explorers with our history and stature would rather die than pay for the bourgeois comfort of a hostel. After that the leprosy service took us in, even though they had regarded us with suspicion the first day because of the letter of introduction we brought from Peru — very complimentary but signed by Dr. Pesce, who plays in the same position as Lusteau.** Alberto shoved various certificates under their noses and they hardly had time to catch their breath before I cornered them about my allergy work, leaving them reeling. The result? We were both offered jobs. I had no intention of accepting but Alberto, for obvious reasons, was considering it. I had been using Roberto’s knife to sketch something on the ground in the street, and consequently we had an altercation with the police who harassed us so badly that instead of Alberto staying, both of us decided to leave for Venezuela as soon as possible. So by the time you get this letter, I’ll be just about ready to leave. If you want to chance it, write to Cucuta, Santander del Norte, Colombia, or very quickly here to Bogotá. Tomorrow I’m off to see Millonarios play Real Madrid in the cheapest stand, since our compatriots are harder to tap than ministers. There is more repression of individual freedom here than in any country we’ve been to, the police patrol the streets carrying rifles and demand your papers every few minutes, which some of them read upside down. The atmosphere is tense and it seems a revolution may be brewing. The countryside is in open revolt and the army is powerless to suppress it. The conservatives battle among themselves and cannot agree, and the memory of April 9, 1948,* still weighs heavily on everyone’s minds. In summary, it’s suffocating here. If the Colombians want to put up with it, good luck to them, but we’re getting out of here as soon as we can. Apparently Alberto has a good chance of finding work in Caracas.
I really hope someone will scribble a few lines to let me know how you are. You won’t have to glean information through Beatríz or some other intermediary this time (I’m not replying to her because we’re limiting ourselves to one letter per city, which is why the card for Alfredito Gabela is enclosed).
> A huge hug from your son, who misses you from head to toe. I hope the old man manages to get himself to Venezuela, the cost of living is more than here, but the pay is much better and that should suit a skinflint (!) like him. By the way, if after living up here for a while he’s still in love with Uncle Sam… but let’s not get distracted, Papi can read between the lines. Chau.
*Argentine footballer.
**Argentine footballer.
*When the radical Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered.
HACIA CARACAS
on the road to caracas
After the inevitable and unnecessary questions, the manhandling and fiddling around with our passports, and the inquisitorial stares, so suspicious as to be worthy of a police officer, the official stamped our passports with a big departure date of July 14, and we set out on foot across the bridge uniting and dividing the two countries. A Venezuelan soldier, with the same spiteful insolence as his Colombian counterparts — a common trait among all military stock, it seems — checked our luggage and then seized the opportunity to submit us to his own personal interrogation, just to show we were talking to someone with “authority.” They detained us for a good while in San Antonio de Táchira but only for administrative formalities, and then we continued our journey in a van which promised to take us to the city of San Cristóbal. Halfway along the road is the customs post where we endured a thorough search of our entire luggage and our persons. The famous knife which had caused so much trouble in Bogotá returned, as the leit motif of a long discussion with the police chief. We conducted this discussion with an ease mastered through dealings with people of such high culture. The revolver was saved because it was inside the pocket of my leather jacket, in a bundle whose stench scared off the customs officers. The knife, recovered with much effort, was a new cause for concern because customs posts were placed all the way to Caracas and we weren’t certain of being able to find brains capable of processing the elementary reasons we gave them. The road linking the two frontier townships is paved perfectly, especially on the Venezuelan side, and reminds me of the mountainous regions around Córdoba. In general, it seems that this country is more prosperous than Colombia.