WAITING FOR THE LECCOS
FOR a month we waited in this tiny straggling rectangle of thatched huts
before the _balsas_ or _callapos_ could get up to us to move our outfit
down the river. Somewhere below us on the turbulent river Lecco crews
were toiling up against the current, dragging and clawing their way
through narrow cañons, hanging fast in places to the bare rock, and
again helped by the long, tropical vines that drooped to the swift
water. Twice they had been beaten back by sudden rises in the river; the
third time they got through, although two balsas had been wrecked and
for the past two days they had lived mainly on the berries and leaves
along the jungle banks.
A splendid lot of half-civilized people, tremendous of muscle and
capable of prodigious feats of strength and endurance on their rivers;
ashore sober and diffident, afloat on their rafts, by right of an
immemorial custom they are always drunk and serenely confident in their
intuitive skill.
For twenty-four hours after they arrived on the hot stone beach below
the bluff on which Mapiri lived they drank and feasted and slept and
then their head man, a Bolivian refugee, announced that all was in
readiness. The gang of workmen we had chartered were collected and
counted and then assigned to the three callapos, a queer lot, but in the
main fairly promising for our purposes.
One was a negro who had been a rubber picker down the river before.
During his absence his wife had left him preferring a gentleman of
lighter color, but who had only one eye; some frontier mechanic had
hammered a patch out of a silver coin and then engraved with a nail the
ragged outlines of an eye, which the owner proudly wore as a most
elegant makeshift. Both of these gentlemen were in the outfit and
ordinarily both would boast in the utmost good nature of their
fascinations with the ladies--except when they were in process of
getting drunk. And on the Bolivian frontier getting drunk is recognized
as a perfectly legitimate pastime. There are no games, no concerted
forms of amusement, the montaña offers nothing except these little
gatherings with some childish hopping as a dance and then the tin cans
of cañassa and the ensuing drunkenness.
There was another man in the gang, a stocky, loose-jointed fellow,
Segorrondo, who was never sober, except during his working hours, but
during that time he was worth any two of the other men--and he never
failed to turn up sober for that allotted period. His capacity was
nothing; three times in one afternoon in Mapiri he was sober and drunk,
with the lines of demarcation startlingly distinct. He rarely joined in
the little hoppings to the reed whistle with his face daubed with clay
or charcoal and decorated with bits of twigs or leaves, yet he was
perfectly sociable and never dangerous. Later, in the established camp
down the river, there came a three day fiesta for which he prepared in
advance. There was a _falca_--a still for making the cañassa from a
half-wild sugar-cane--up the river, and he drove his bargain before the
fiesta began. He was, for the sum of one Boliviano--about half a dollar,
gold--to be allowed to drink all he chose during the three days, but was
to carry none away.
Long before dawn on the first day he was at the falca; for three days he
never moved from the litter of crushed sugar-cane, lying in a stupor
from which he only roused himself to reach out shakily for a tin cup of
warm alcohol as it dripped from the still-worm. We expected a wreck to
show up, but on the morning of the fourth day he returned, grinning
cheerfully, and worked as though nothing had occurred.
Also there was Nosario, a stocky boy of about twelve or fourteen, who
had been added as general utility around the cook or camp. He was
worthless and it later developed that his wife, a Cholo lady of some
thirty or forty years, had prodded him into the effort in order to add
to her matrimonial support.
Agamemnon viewed the whole collection with great scorn. "These yer
pipple ain't noways fitten, ba's," he would remark. The other darky was
included in his disfavor.
Agamemnon always swelled with pride at the thought that he was a
Britisher by birth--born in Barbadoes--and he counted Americans as being
too subtly differentiated to be separated; humbly accepting his place as
assigned in their eyes, he looked down with scorn on these shambling,
good natured animals.
During the four weeks of delay in Mapiri we had seen much of a
neighboring rubber baron, old man Violand, whose barraca was a half
day's ride over the steep trails. The old man was as typically Teutonic
as though he had but just pushed his mild, blue-eyed way into the
jungle. His headquarters--a square of palm-thatched and palm-walled
buildings--was self-sustaining from the coarse flour that a row of
Indian women were grinding between heavy stones in one corner of the
patio to his coffee and also a superior brand of cañassa distilled in a
wooden worm, cooled in a hollow palm log, which really had the flavor of
a fine liqueur. He had been the chief figure in a couple of rubber wars
over disputed territory with his nearest neighbor some thirty miles away
and he showed a spattering of bullet holes in every room of his house
with delighted pride. The dispute was a trifle complicated, but as the
result, his opponent was a fugitive from Bolivia while Violand himself
tiptoed into Sorata or occasionally La Paz with some caution.
Often during the month we rode down to see him--he would have had us
stay there for life. No sooner did our mules round the shoulder of the
hill than we could see some small Indian boy darting off with the news.
The familiar figure of the old man would bulk in the doorway to confirm
the news and then his voice would begin booming out orders; chickens
squawked, sheep blatted, and at once the place was a turmoil of pursuit.
From an outbuilding would come the blue smoke of fresh fires and the
shrill clacking of the well-grimed Aymará cook summoning her family
help. Always were we greeted thus and always there was a ready crowd of
Indians at our heels on the crest of the boom to take the mules when we
arrived and feed and water or put them up for the night.
The formalities over or properly supervised, Violand would seat himself
at a huge table with the top a single plank of solid mahogany three
inches thick and before the ingredients for a gin cocktail. At his elbow
a tiny little girl, one of the daughters of the Aymará cook, took her
position to trot out for anything lacking in the first array. A gin
cocktail is sugar, Angostura bitters, and gin--and I have seen it served
in full goblets. All the rest of the forenoon the host would busy
himself compounding this. It made not the slightest difference whether
anyone else in the party joined him or not, genially he would attend to
it himself in little sips whose cumulative effect was prodigious. As the
midday breakfast hour approached he would roar for pisco, a species of
Peruvian brandy, and then, as the little Aymará maiden announced the
final hour of nutrition, champagne.
And then the dinner, half a sheep, or a whole pig and once the head of a
young bullock to whose cooking the old man had given personal attention,
waddling back and forth from the mahogany table to the cook house
accompanied by the little Aymará girl fluttering in a state of ecstatic
excitement. For the rest there were the chickens and the native foods,
the chalona slowly simmered for a day to make it taste like food, with
the chuña floating in it like so many old medicine corks, the chickens,
the platanos, boiled green and pith-like or better in their black,
melting over-ripeness and to be eaten with a spoon, baked and delicious,
native bread from home made flour, and imported preserves for dessert.
Also there was champagne and whiskey and pisco and cañassa and gin
cocktails again until in final triumph a little beer--everything
lukewarm or tepid from the shallows of the tropical brook.
By and by the old man would venture on a German song or two and then
beckon to the little beady-eyed Aymará girl; off she would dart to
return with a couple of heavy footed Indian women. The host would
rise--with assistance--and trolling some uncertain song march off to his
bedroom to doze. And the rest of the time would be spent with his son
and manager, both fine, pink cheeked young Germans who looked after
affairs. It sounds like a wassail, though as a matter of fact, it was
old Violand who was the chief performer--he was an old man, civilization
was far away, eight days to La Paz over pass and plateaus and blizzard
and after that to Germany--six months for a letter and an answer!
Later he would reappear suddenly, generally clad in a shrimp pink bath
gown, a patent, German Emperor-moustache-shaper over his moustache, and
groping for his spectacles. When they were found he once more settled
himself for a pleasant time, generally having to go through a second
search for a key so that another bottle of bitters could be produced.
The morning after, he would appear, fresh and blue-eyed and solicitous.
"You hef a goot time--yes?" then he would chuckle until he shook in
ponderous ripples and go on in Spanish, "I do not remember much--after
dinner--yesterday--a good dinner--yes? A good dinner is much in this
country of the black gold--the rubber--yes--we drink a little for the
digestion, la, la--yes. Hoi, mozo--" the little Indian girl clattered
inside for the bottles--"just one little cocktail before the
saddle--yes?" His face would beam in its frame of thin whiskers with the
proudly upstanding German-emperor-moustaches the center of their
radiations.
In the jungles across the river from Mapiri was another rubber barraca
in which a Bolivian owner held court. Every morning we could see a dozen
thin threads of blue smoke trickling above the forest where his pickers
were smoking their morning collection of rubber milk. Over there the
cañassa was always on draft for all at all times, while half the week
was a fiesta and Sunday a brawling bedlam.
Slowly the days dragged on with an occasional rumor of the progress of
the Leccos and the callapos. Once, as much to furnish a variation as
anything else, I routed out a couple of jars of mincemeat and ventured
on some pies. An oven was heated, a big clay dome, such as our
great-great-grandmothers used, from out of which the fire was drawn and
on a long handled paddle I shoved in a load of pies. Almost instantly
they browned and then passed to a crisp black before the paddle could
maneuver them out again. The native population, however, appreciated
them highly. It was small loss as the manufacture of pie crust is
somewhat of an undertaking--at least in that tropical temperature. The
lard, native or imported, is a beautiful amber liquid that is bought or
carried in bottles and pours with no more deliberation than so much
water.
A little later a general fiesta in Mapiri helped out the dull waiting a
little. We noticed an extra number of candles burning before the altar
in the little mud-walled church and for some days before there had been
the thrumming of hollow-tree drums from the little huts of the village.
The night before the great day, while it was scarcely dark, the big
drums began booming with a typical Indian rhythm; from the line of huts
came the droning wail of the guests that rose and fell in fitful bursts,
while now and again a straggling line of drunken Cholos, men and women,
in a weaving single file, trotted in a staggering hop around the grass
grown plaza. There was feasting and drinking and noise; from the barraca
across the river came a delegation to lend a joyous hand. Toward morning
it died down, slumbered uneasily during the forenoon, and then began
working to a frenzy of excitement as evening approached.
All the drums had been concentrated in the church, tallow dips lined the
walls, attached by their own tallow to the sun-baked clay, and cast
uncertain masses of shifting shadows that flickered in the hot and smoky
drafts; overhead a flood of bats chittered in amazement at the invasion
of their domain. On one side of the church were squatted all of the old
women in Mapiri with dull, cañassa bleared eyes and cheeks distended
with coca leaves hammering out a monotonous rhythm on the drums.
Before the altar and facing it side by side were two lines of the
smaller boys with the tallest at the front and then shading down to the
rear, each naked to the waist but for some cheap necklaces of gay beads.
Each had a forked twig like those we used for our juvenile sling-shots,
and strung on a wire or twisted bark thread that connected the forks
were a dozen little bits of flat tin hammered out of old sardine cans.
Like castanets they jiggled the forked stick in rhythm with the drums
and as they jiggled shuffling in a hopping, dancing lock-step in single
file up to the altar, and then back in the same way half the depth of
the beaten earth floor. As one file advanced the other jiggled back and
so on alternately. For hours they had kept it up and there was no sign
of either a stop or a rest.
The rest of the villagers flitted in or out as ordinary spectators,
still nibbling at portions of the feast or sharing a continuously filled
bottle of cañassa with the drumming old women. It was not until daybreak
that Mapiri dropped into an exhausted rest.
During this fiesta there had been no shooting of dynamite--that is
quarter pound sticks with a short fuse like a fire-cracker. This once
more popular amusement had been dampened by the last really important
fiesta they had celebrated. A Cholo gentleman had, it seemed, zigzagged
out into the grass grown plaza with his stick of dynamite, lighted it
from his cigarette, and then in a drunken effort to throw it away had
dropped it. He did not notice this trifling difference in his program
and swinging dizzily round with the effort of his throw fell sprawling
upon the cartridge. His demise is still spoken of with awe on that
river. Therefore it was that Mapiri celebrated a quiet fiesta.
And then the balsas arrived. Their Lecco crew gorged and slept and drank
for a day and then were as fresh as ever, busy in lashing each three
balsas together with cross logs to make callapos for the down-stream
voyage. Three of these callapos we had and, when loaded with their
freight, crews and workmen passengers, their logs were four inches under
water, the little platforms on which the baggage was piled and carefully
lashed, rising like a little island on stilts above the current.