Besides the Anglo-Saxons, there were the managers of two “Belgian” houses—the only stores for some hundred miles around, mere thatched huts like the rest, with no distinguishing signs—an odd German or two, an argentino who wore shoes; and the rest were barefoot natives, except for an occasional sun-faded passerby. Like San José, Santiago de Chiquitos, set almost exactly in the geographical center of South America, was a “reduction” of the Jesuits, with more than 1500 inhabitants at the time of their expulsion. To-day it is a sleepy little hamlet of some two streets of one-story huts among gentle and frondoso hills, with a constant breeze and no insects, lolling through an easy, barefoot, loose-gowned existence, chiefly in hammocks. Coffee bushes fill every back yard, the coffee of Santiago being famous through all Chiquitos. A languid commerce in cattle, sugar, and alcohol is carried on intermittently; the region round about is rich in timber. High above all else a wonderfully beautiful palm-tree stands out against the cerulean sky.
The inhabitants retain many of the customs bequeathed them by the Jesuits. Only a wooden church was built here, with four bells in a wooden tower on legs some distance from the main building. Into this an Indian climbs several times a day, and more often by night, to make life hideous. Why the Loyalists were so fond of the continual hammering of these instruments of torture was a mystery to me at the time, but in the library of Asunción I ran across an old volume that explained the matter. The writer, a European member of the brotherhood, visiting a “reduction,” asked the superior why the Padres saw fit to keep themselves awake most of the night for no apparent reason. The Jesuit answered: “Brother, we keep our faithful flock toiling all day in the fields. After the evening meal they drop at once to sleep without remembering their marital duties. Their first fatigue worn off, we remind them of those duties now and then during the night, waking them up with the noise of drums and bells, to the end that the succeeding generation may be larger, to the glorification of the Sacred Church and our Holy Society.” And to think that I had fancied the jangling of church-bells all down the length of the Andes to be a mere caprice of the holy fathers!
The fiestas of Jesuit days are religiously preserved. Several nights we were kept awake by the monotonous, heathenish beating of a drum, often accompanied by a shrill fife. By day, to the “music” of these, most of the population marched round and round the town, holding hands and swinging them high before and behind them in a kind of shuffle and whirl on their bare feet in the silent sand streets, getting ever drunker on chicha of maize or the stronger totay. They danced also the chobena, to the accompaniment of the manais, a hollow calabash with seeds inside it. There was no resident priest, but an old Indian who had assisted the former cura conducted a service each Sunday, always ending it with a debauch that hung over into the middle of the week. There is one custom, however, which even the Jesuits could not bequeath them,—that of industry. In the olden days the entire population was sent to work each morning with drums, prayers, and processions; to-day only the processions, prayers, and drums remain.
As in all Chiquitos, the women and girls of Santiago, chiefly Indian in blood, with now and then a trace of the negro, solidly built as an anta, wear only the loose tipoy. Their customs are, if possible, even more easy-going than those of San José. Yet they are by no means forward, being rather bashful, indeed, with little sense of wrong-doing, and are said to yield more easily to blandishments and trinkets than to money. The former priest demanded fabulous sums for his services, which is no doubt one of several reasons why virtually none, even of the “best families,” are married. The moral attitude of the place may most easily be gaged by an episode that occurred during my stay. A shoemaker living in the other half of the thatched hut occupied by “los americanos” learned that the young woman who passed as his wife had yielded to the entreaties of one of the foreigners. He beat the girl until her cries could be heard in the office across the broad plaza. But when, next day, he met the offending American, he bowed respectfully with a polite, “Buenos días, señor. Y cómo está usté’?”
The shoemaker who lived next door to “los americanos” in Santiago de Chiquitos, and his latest “wife”
A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center background. The man dancing with the latter’s “housekeeper” is an Englishman born in the Argentine
The distance from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the Paraguay turned out to be 135 leagues, something over 400 miles, divided as follows: Santa Cruz to San José, 56 leagues; to Santiago, 32; to Santa Ana, 25; to Puerto Suarez, 22. The last stage of the journey I covered astride one of the company’s mules, hardly an improvement in comfort over walking, on such a route. Luckily, the rains were delayed that year, or the difficulties of all this trans-Bolivian journey would have been quadrupled, and I might have been held for months in the hilltop hamlet of Santiago until the floods common to the twenty-leagues or more west of the Paraguay subsided. Day after day we rode through the endless forest that crowded us close on either hand, with no other sign of humanity than the sulky mozo trotting behind me, sleeping in some tiny pascana where a moon so bright one could have read by it looked down upon the crosses of soldiers and travelers who had died on other journeys, or peered dully in at me through the mesh of my mosquitero. Palmares, quagmires thick-grown with hardy palm-trees, in which we plunged to the saddle for long distances, alternated with thirsty stretches of waterless sand. In places the heavier woods gave way to dense brush, head-high and always thorny. Across these, to the right, lay the vast Bolivian Chaco—or the Paraguayan, according to how the dispute shall finally be settled—in which the sun set so blood-red that the painter who dared put half the reality on canvas would be accused of gross exaggeration. A strip of delicate pink sky blended quickly into the wet-blue of the endless jungle, darkness settled quickly down, and we rode noiselessly on, the sky an immense field of stars, bats circling around our heads and alighting again and again in the sandy road ahead, to spring up with a peculiar little squeak when the mule’s hoofs had all but touched them. No other sound was heard, except the chirping of the jungle, chiefly the long-drawn creak and short staccato of two species of crickets, and occasionally the noise of some wild animal fleeing unseen at our approach. On such a night we came to the Tucabaca, the only river of size between the Guapay and the Paraguay. I ordered a halt until the moon appeared, but clouds hid it, and we came perilously near losing a mule in forcing the frightened animals across. Frequently the Tucabaca rises in a few hours to a raging torrent that can only be crossed in a pelota, or in the dugout of a surly old Brazilian negro living in a cluster of huts on the further bank.
At Santa Ana, eighteen waterless miles beyond, we were overtaken by two of the gringo colony of Santiago. Calling itself a city, the place is merely a row of thatched huts around a grass-grown space, with a mud-hole to keep it alive, saintly in its customs as all the towns of this saintly route. Its corregidor takes orders, not from the subprefect of San José, but from the delegado at Puerto Suarez, sent out from La Paz by way of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil! The place is a headquarters of jejenes, and the wild Indians descend upon it periodically. At the very edge of the hamlet lies a barrizal, a mud-hole three miles long, famous for its victims. But beyond, territory which the year before had been an almost unbroken lake was for long stretches without water to drink, though we wallowed in more than one swamp and slough. Near the corrals of Yacuces, in a low, humid region where rain often falls, we came upon telegraph-poles, old and sagging, heavy with parasites and creepers. The line planned by the government from Puerto Suarez to Santa Cruz had been abandoned some forty miles out, and cart-drivers now cut down the poles and use the wire to repair their wagons.