Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

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!