Chapter XXII · THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA (continued 2)

Somehow, when one has been out of it for a time, the Latin-American atmosphere is almost pleasing—when one is in a mood for it. Here I found myself enjoying again the hoarse screams of lottery-ticket vendors, the cries of milk-dealers on horseback, their cans dangling beneath their legs, the bread-man with his red, white and blue barrel on either side of the horse he rides, the countless little shops where refugees, huddling under the protection of the capital, strive to make both ends meet by trying to sell something, content at least to be no longer at the mercy of government as well as revolutionists out on the little farms that have long since gone back to jungle. Caracas rises and begins business later than La Guayra, where the heat of noonday makes a siesta imperative; it is a bit less foppish than Bogotá or Quito, perhaps because of its greater proximity to the world. Here, too, are ragged men and boys who soften their incessant appeals by using a diminutive “Tiene usted un fosforito?” “Dame un centavito, caballero?” “Regálame un regalito, quiere?” It is easier to comply now and then with such requests in a city where prices have not leaped skyward, as in most of the world. At the “Hotel Filadelfia” my room and food cost four bolívares (almost eighty cents) a day. True, I found my hammock more comfortable than the bed, though the nights were somewhat chilly in it; and the impudence, indolence, and indifference of the caraqueño servant is notorious. Ask anyone, from manager to the kitchen-boy, to do something, and the reply was almost certain to be a sullen, “That’s not my work,” nor would they ever deign to pass the word on to whosoever’s work it was. Evidently they belonged to a union. As in Ecuador, hotel guests were forbidden to talk politics.

Some of the principal streets were lined with gambling houses of all classes, from two-cent-ante workmen’s places to sumptuous parlors with pianos playing and the doors wide open to all, even to a penurious “gringo” who came only to watch the heavy-eyed croupiers and the other curious night types who make their living by coin manipulation. Though “the cheapest thing in Caracas is women,” they are seldom seen on the streets. Illegitimacy, like illiteracy, is more prevalent than its opposite, but it is not the Spanish-American way to flaunt social vices. American influence is more in evidence than in any other South American country; Caracas is the only city on that continent where I saw native boys playing baseball. Germans control much of 645the commerce and the longest railway in the country, from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, but with these exceptions the English hold most large enterprises, including electric-lights, telephones, and street-cars, and are reputed to be clever in keeping out American competition.

Like Santiago de Chile, Caracas has a limited number of “best families,” who form the “aristocracy” and to some extent an oligarchy, though intermarriage has produced among them some of the ills of European royalty. There are good-looking, not a few pretty, and even occasionally beautiful women in this class, though the casual visitor sees them only behind the bars of their windows or promenading in carriages and automobiles around El Paraiso across the Guaire on Sunday afternoons, and at the evening band concerts in the Plaza Bolívar. On the whole, this so-called higher class is more corrupt and worthless than the workers, especially those of the llanos, who at least are laborious and long-suffering, even though ignorant, superstitious, and often victims of the same erotic influences as the rich and educated. It is natural that the political power in Venezuela should have been wrested from this weak “aristocracy” by hardier types from the interior.

The most notorious of these, the chief founder of that military dictatorship which to this day holds Venezuela in a tighter grip than any other country in South America, was Castro. Charles II of England would have felt at home with this fallen tyrant, a degenerate who made use of his power and government riches to corrupt the maidenhood of his native land. His subordinates, especially the governor of the federal district, were chosen less for their ability as rulers than for their success in coaxing young girls to visit the tyrant in a house across the Guaire, where he carried on his amours almost publicly. In those days Caracas was overrun with saucy little presidential mistresses in short skirts. Force, or anything else likely to lead to public scandal, however, was not included among Castro’s amorous weapons—for there was a Señora Castro before whose wrath the highest authorities of Venezuela were wont to flee in dismay. The terror which Castro himself still evokes among the masses of the country is such that his name to this day is almost never openly spoken. In Ciudad Bolívar I sat one evening, reading an exaggerated tale of the tyrant’s lust, a book proscribed in Venezuela but stacked up in the book-stores of Trinidad, when the hotel-keeper paused to ask in a trembling voice how I dared have such a volume in my possession.

“Why not?” I asked.

646“Ah, it is true,” he answered, turning away, “in the great United States there are no tyrants to make a man fear his own shadow.”

Aside from his patent faults, however, Castro was a man of strength and native ability; though this was offset by his provincial ignorance, a misconception of the unknown outside world which led him to believe he could easily thrash England, France and Germany combined, so that he took pains to alienate foreign governments. It is an error into which his successor has been careful not to fall.

General Juan Vicente Gomez is an andino, like Castro—that is, a man from the mountainous part of the country near the Colombian border, with considerable Indian blood and a primitive force that overwhelms the soft-handed “aristocracy” of Caracas which once ruled the country. Like Castro, he is ignorant, strong, coarse, and shrewd—fond of young women, too, though with strength enough to put them into the background when they interfere with more important matters. Years ago he mortgaged his property to help Castro, but the latter treated him like a peon, even after appointing him vice-president. Gomez, however, knew how to bide his time. By 1908 his dissipations had left Castro no choice but to go to the German baths or die, and he delegated his power to the obsequious vice-president and went. A few days later Gomez set out at four in the morning for a round of the military barracks, called out the commanders, thrust a revolver into their ribs, and requested them henceforth to bear in mind that he was president of Venezuela. This was his first “election.” During his seven-year term he brought about some improvements, particularly in roads and the army, not to mention acquiring immense properties, while the exiled Castro was losing his to former victims who were suing him in the Venezuelan courts. The constitution stated that a president could not be elected to succeed himself. Toward the end of his term, therefore, Gomez nominally resigned, put in a temporary figurehead, and had congress “elect” him again. At the same time he had a new constitution made in which there is no mention of reëlections, with the understanding that it was to come into force when he took the oath of office.

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 647absolute 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 648ambitions 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:

649NOTICE

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. 650Then 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