This he was to have done some months before, but, being a cautious man, as well as preferring country life, “the elect”—never did I meet a Venezuelan who dared mention him directly by name—remained on his own ranches in Maracay, a hundred miles out along the German railway, leaving one of the minor palaces occupied by a tool called “provisional president.” Castro himself, however, never attained such absolute power as the new tyrant, who puts recalcitrant congressmen in jail, personally appoints state, municipal, and rural authorities, and in general smiles benignly upon the helpless constitution. Not the least amusing contrasts in Venezuela were the private opinions of its chief newspaper editors and the slavish attitude of the sheets themselves, the entire front pages of which were taken up day after day with photographs of the “President-Elect of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Army” in this or that daily occupation, followed, to the total exclusion of any real news, by obsequious telegrams from his henchmen in all parts of the country, from misinformed foreigners or foreign governments, often from imaginary sources, congratulating him and his countrymen that “the greatest man of the century has again been chosen as their leader by the great and free Venezuelan people.” Even over-altruistic or subsidized American periodicals with a South American circulation frequently hold up the present tyrant of Venezuela as an example of the progressive constitutional ruler. Many of the best people of that country would prefer even American intervention to the illiterate tyranny which makes it dangerous to speak their real thoughts above a whisper; but there is a strict censorship, and Gomez, wiser than Castro, professes great friendship for all great foreign powers, particularly the overshadowing “Colossus of the North.”
In the long run a people probably gets about as good a government as it deserves, and a stern dictator, on the style of Diaz of Mexico, is perhaps the ruler best suited to Venezuela. But from our more enlightened point of view such rule would not seem to promise social improvement. The country is bled white to keep up the army and several other presidential hobbies, to the exclusion of schools and other forms of progress. Every cigarette-paper bears a printed government stamp alleging that it pays duty in benefit of “Instrucción Pública,” a source yielding more than a million dollars a year; yet it is years since the students of the University of Caracas struck because Gomez spent the legal income of the schools on the army, and at last accounts it had not yet been reopened. The dictator himself can read, but not write, except to sign his name. Every morning at four he was at his desk in Maracay, the business of the day laid out before him,—first his private affairs, next his hobby, the army, then politics and the country in general. According to a genuine authority on the subject, he laboriously spells out all the correspondence himself, then calls in a shrewd and trusted uncle, a man too old to have ambitions to succeed him, and together they concoct the replies. The present government of Venezuela is truly a family government. General José Vicente Gomez, the son whom the dictator is evidently grooming to be his ultimate successor, is Inspector General of the Army; General Juan Gomez is governor of the federal district; Colonel Alí Gomez is second vice-president; two other sons are presidents of states—the dictator, by the way, is a bachelor—and so on through the family. Like many another Venezuelan of numerous descendants, “the elect” never married; but of his scores of children by many different women he has legitimized the few most promising and lifted them to his own level—a practical, man-governed form of survival of the fittest.
With the white mists still clinging to Caracas and its sierra, I strolled out one morning along the “Highway of the West” through the flat, rich vega to Dos Caminos and Antimano, where the German railway breaks out of the lap of hills and squirms away to Valencia and Puerto Cabello. A private way through deep woods with coffee bushes brought me to the little country home of Manuel Diaz Rodríguez, and at the same time reminded me that all is not tyranny, sloth, and hopelessness in the mistreated Land of the Orinoco. For here, amid stretches of light-green sugar-cane that seems destined ultimately to bring material prosperity to the country, lives one of South America’s greatest contributors to modern Spanish literature.
I had planned to say farewell to South America by walking up through the “Puerta de Caracas” and over the mountain range to La Guayra. But on the last evening a tropical deluge roared down upon the capital, and I dared not tempt fate to prevent me from reaching home within four years of my departure on my Latin-American pilgrimage. The last day of August dawned brilliant and cool. In my pocket was a ticket to Broadway and just enough ragged Venezuelan money to carry me down the mountain and through the swarming grafters of La Guayra to the steamer. Cheery with the thought of home-coming, I lugged my own baggage—to the disdainful astonishment of the Venezuelan crowd—out onto the platform and stowed it away under a second-class bench. I had no sooner stepped back into the waiting-room, however, than a gaunt and coppery caraqueño slowly mounted a chair in front of a blackboard over the ticket-office, and with nerve-racking deliberation began to write, in a schoolboy hand which required some ten seconds for each stroke and fully fifteen minutes for the entire announcement:
NOTICE
On account of landslides there will be no morning train. Notice will be given if the afternoon train descends.
I had felt it in my bones! Fate did not purpose that I should ever escape from this unattractive continent! This was the first train that had failed to run in eight months, and of course it must be the very one I had depended on to get me down in time for the steamer. It was too late to walk—and with my baggage I could not run. Automobiles, quick to scent trouble, were already raising their price for the trip from $20 to $30 and $40. At last I found a Ford that would carry me and two other Americans down for a hundred bolívares—which was about ninety more than we owned among us. But by some stroke of fortune a thoroughly human minister had been accredited to Caracas by our enigmatical State Department. I regret to report that we routed him out of bed, and ten minutes later were dashing full-tilt along the pool-filled and broken highway to the coast. On the outskirts of the capital there were innumerable lethargic donkey trains to dodge and pass. Then we were twisting and turning along the mountain road, with thousands of feet of loose shale piled sheer above and sudden death falling away directly below us. The heavy rain had brought down rocks larger than dog-kennels, and in places had heaped up loose stones and earth until the road was practically blocked. At one such spot a big, aristocratic automobile stood eyeing in despair a sharp V-shaped turn it could not make. Our unpretentious conveyance scampered up on the slide, slipped to the very edge of the deadly abyss, then climbed down upon solid road again and sped on. Higher and higher climbed the serpentine carretera, constantly whirling around turns where the slightest slip of the mechanism or of the doubtful nerves of our very Venezuelan chauffeur would have ended our journeyings for all time, tearing blindly around sharp-angled curves with a bare six inches between us and instant death, and that six inches likely to be treacherous sliding shale. Far up among the reddish barren hills we passed the summit, then began to descend by the same perilous highway, where we seemed ever and anon to be riding off into the bluish void of infinity, suddenly coming cut on a view of the coast and indigo sea far below us, and for a long time thereafter winding and twisting incessantly downward, with no certainty that all our efforts had not been in vain. Then all at once La Guayra appeared, and out along the breakwater still lay the steamer, tiny as a rowboat from this height, but plainly in no mood to move until we had time to comply with the irksome Venezuelan formalities and scramble on board. But it was a painful anticlimax to the life I had led in South America to be rescued at the last by a Ford!
Of several hours’ struggle with swarming official and unofficial grafters, with strutting negroes in uniform and “generals” who signed with the only word they could write my permission to depart from their fetid land, of the final cupidities of the “corporation,” I will say nothing, lest I again be betrayed into language unbefitting a homeward journey. Suffice it that at last I clambered dripping wet up the gangway, at the foot of which an ill-bred youth in a Venezuelan uniform snatched the “permission to embark” in pursuit of which I had spent perspiring hours, and soon black night had blotted out from my sight the variegated but not soon to be forgotten continent of South America.
THE END