The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘If you mean,’ replied Carver, ‘that I must be vouched for by any committee which will take the trouble to print a few letter-heads and obtain some half-witted minor royalty for a patron, then I will see that it is done.’

  Being a son of parents so poor that his career could only be made in territory where no one else would serve, Don Felipe was bewildered by the arrogance of an ancient university. He perceived, however, that his decayed bungalow, commanding nothing but a landing-stage, a handful of demoralised military and a collection of thatched roofs hardly distinguishable from the surrounding forest, was being invited into partnership against the whole easily impressionable world.

  ‘It will take me a month,’ said Solomon Carver.

  It took him two. When the plane from Lima set him down once more on the river, his credentials were in perfect order and described him as an anthropologist.

  The Diocesan Visitor, disapprovingly silent while Don Felipe repeated this conversation, replied at once that Carver indeed had influential friends. The suave enquiries of the Church had found out everything about the man. Before the war, a lecturer on anthropology and comparative religion. A serious and too self-sufficient colonel at the end of the war. And then, in his early forties, he had considered it his duty to reject civilisation, earnestly proclaiming that there was no other hope for the future of humanity but intensified study of its beginnings. That in itself, Father Hilario insisted, was a doctrine which might lead to all kinds of aberration.

  Don Felipe did not agree, but had no wish to argue with Authority. From the government point of view it was far more important that he should be able to reply to consuls and relatives that Carver was safe and well, and that no unseemly expedition was required to look for him.

  News of the man had filtered down from Indian to Indian, and Indian to trader, and trader to Don Felipe’s office. He had wandered about among the tribes who understood a little Spanish, learning their languages and how to keep alive. He penetrated further and further into the vaporous gorges where the Amazon forests became the Andes, and settled down at last with the dying, melancholy Icuari. Apparently he had found what he wanted, or they had.

  His polygamy was a fact. Down the years the number of wives credited to Carver had grown from forty to two hundred. Don Felipe had once or twice considered whether it might not be his business to remonstrate with him; but it was never urgent business. The Icuari were not—by the standards of the Amazon—particularly difficult to reach; they were just of no interest. They had neither mines nor trade nor cultivated clearings nor a navigable river. Water cataracted into their country or shot out of high caves like jets from giant hosepipes.

  ‘He has gone native,’ said Don Felipe. ‘That is regrettable, but of no importance.’

  Father Hilario stabbed with two restless fingers at the report which lay on the administrator’s desk, as if laying anathema upon it. It was the report which had brought him up the river. It came from Bolivia; it was detailed and official; and it stated that Carver was not an anthropologist at all but some sort of protestant missionary in disguise.

  ‘And that is of very great importance,’ he pronounced. ‘When Anglo-Saxons give themselves to their peculiar religions, they become enraged as mad dogs.’

  ‘You have no idea of what it means, father,’ Don Felipe protested in a voice of official caution. ‘Twelve days by launch, eight by canoe, weeks when we shall be wading rather than walking, and without food for the porters.’

  ‘When did you last undertake the regulation tour of your district?’

  ‘Bueno! Bueno! But when I am away there is no one to attend to the correspondence.’

  ‘Your secretary, perhaps—’

  Don Felipe made a last, hopeless attempt to avert the inevitable.

  ‘Look, father—is it likely, this story of wives? Doubtless it arises only from the unfortunate name with which his godparents presented him. Down here it is hard enough for a man of taste to find one tolerable woman, let alone two hundred.’

  The Diocesan Visitor showed the teeth of the Church as well as his own in a formal smile.

  ‘But if the doctrines of this man of taste—whatever they may be—were to spread to Christian Indians, you realise that my bishop would be bound to protest to Lima.’

  Don Felipe surrendered. He gave orders that his camp equipment be packed and that the white-and-gold uniform by which he was accustomed to impress the more accessible native chiefs be left behind. He knew as much about travel in the forest as any trader’s headman; that was why he had used all possible tact to avoid it.

  The river journey turned out to be more tolerable than he expected. In thirteen days—four by launch and nine by canoe—the party reached the end of the navigable waterways and the last of the Indians who had any regular dealings with the white man. Father Hilario, having got his way, was an excellent companion. He was quick to adjust his approach to any objective. Severity towards officialdom. Considerate and amusing manners in camp.

  He also had patience—and that, as soon as they set foot on comparatively dry land, was an indispensable quality. Carver and his Icuari could only be reached by choosing the right valley to follow. The ridges ran more or less parallel to the Cordillera, and each was a range of mountains in its own right. Sheer cliff and impassable forest barred all crossing from one valley to the next.

  Neither map nor instinct was the least help. A guide who knew the gorges was essential. The first deliberately wasted time. Don Felipe, who was mild as the Indians themselves, dismissed him with courtesy after four desperate days in the bed of a torrent. The second insisted that they had taken the wrong tributary of the Madre de Dios, and that they must return down river and try again. Don Felipe stood by his own notes. True, he had compiled them in his flowery patio, but the facts of geography were more easily seen from a basket chair than the bottom of a gorge; he knew that his route was not so mistaken as all that.

  The third guide, obtained when food was already beginning to run short, had traded with the Icuari and had no doubt whatever of the path. He insisted that a white man had persuaded the tribe to leave the dripping forest and take to high ground. Their country could be reached in three days’ march.

  Don Felipe understood that confidence had been established and that this at last was the truth. He decided to send his men downstream to the launch and to food, and to go on alone with Father Hilario.

  ‘Ask him about the two hundred wives,’ ordered the Visitor, who did not speak the language of the river sources.

  The Indian, not being sure of any numbers over ten, replied to Don Felipe’s question:

  ‘The cacique has as many as there are stars, and all dressed in white.’

  Feeling a natural sympathy for anyone who merely desired to be left in peace, Don Felipe was reluctant to stir up trouble before he had to. He translated tactfully:

  ‘He says that when we get nearer to the stars, we shall see women dressed in white.’

  ‘You see!’ exclaimed Father Hilario. ‘The fellow is teaching some sort of Mohammedan paradise!’

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘And false doctrines travel as far and as fast as the true. This Salomón must leave the country at once.’

  In the next two days they approached the stars a deal nearer than suited Don Felipe, who believed in letting a mule do his climbing, or Father Hilario, who usually carried his bishop’s authority by canoe. The guide’s route, hardly ever perceptible as a path, would have nothing to do with water and rose seven thousand feet to the top of a ridge.

  Forty miles to the west, across canyon after canyon unexplorable by anything but vegetation, they could see the mists recoiling from the sheer cliffs and gravelled slopes of the Cordillera Oriental. Don Felipe looked longingly at the edge of the high Peru which was his true homeland. To reach that glimpse of bare skyline would mean, he reckoned, a journey of over six weeks, down the rivers to the frontier of Brazil and Bolivia and then up again.

  ‘And now?
’ he asked the guide, dreading lest the appalling gorge beneath them should have to be crossed, and the ridge beyond it climbed.

  ‘Not far. We sleep here.’

  Slow questioning revealed that they were within three hours of the nearest Icuari village; but the guide was unwilling to appear at dusk without warning—though he agreed that the tribe was very peaceful and had no firearms, not even the white man. He spoke of them, now that he was on the edge of their country, with almost religious respect.

  Don Felipe was surprised at his tone. The Icuari, so far as he knew, were still in a state of transition from food-gathering to agriculture—hardly better, in fact, than a dejected band of apes which had retreated westwards from war and the rivers to die, alone, in the uninhabitable country of the spray.

  The two Peruvians and their guide slept in the shelter of an overhanging cliff where camp-fires had been numerous enough to burn the moss from the rock. In the morning their path entered a cleared and beaten track. The ridge broadened and then dipped to a saddle. Looking down on it, they could see huts and cultivated clearings among the trees. A white-robed woman crossed from shadow to shadow.

  ‘It is true!’ exclaimed Father Hilario, eager with indignation.

  Don Felipe, who had expected nothing more than the hardly visible, timid shelters of savages, was far more impressed by the signs of a purposeful community than by the flicker of white. There was even an alignment of huts; you could almost call it a street. He guardedly expressed his surprise, and was conscious of a humble pleasure that there below them was a situation which could not be bullied into shape by any Diocesan Visitor.

  Having no other evidence of his rank and importance, he assumed an official bearing and preceded Father Hilario into the village. There was a reserved welcome. It was clear that the Icuari expected them and had no fear. The men were the usual bobbed-haired, stocky, copper creatures of the forest, but they carried no arms and their manners were self-assured rather than chattering.

  Most of the women were heavy, apathetic and busy with objectless activities; but among them moved a kind of Wellsian élite, all very young and dressed in sack-like tunics of white cotton confined at the waist by brilliantly-dyed cords. They looked competent—the last quality one would expect, Father Hilario thought, in idle and corrupted women. Yet there could be no doubt who they were. The devil, too, could sing a psalm when he wished. And why were all the visible children—plenty of them—between the ages of two and four?

  Out of the trees, upon the edge of which the children were playing, came a European woman, severely dressed and freshly laundered. She greeted the party in blunt but fairly efficient Spanish, and invited them to accompany her to the upper village.

  Invited? It was an order from the matron. Don Felipe explained that he and his companion were by no means the casual and predatory travellers they looked, but the administrator of the district and the representative of the bishop.

  ‘We know that already, Don Felipe,’ she answered, ‘and we are all very glad you have come.’

  ‘How did you get here, sister?’ he asked, knowing that she had never passed through his territory.

  ‘From Bolivia.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘On foot. It takes weeks, but it is not really difficult since Señor Carver made the track. A wonderful man! He has worked alone for so long.’

  ‘Alone except for you?’ Father Hilario asked.

  A slight lift of her heavy eyebrows suggested that she did not consider his remark in the best of taste.

  ‘Except for my cousin and myself,’ she answered. ‘Naturally there are two of us.’

  ‘You are missionaries?’

  ‘No, father. We only serve.’

  ‘But Christians?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As a priest, Father Hilario knew simplicity when he saw it. As a man of the world, he also recognised its dangers. It was quite possible for this thin, straight woman in, he supposed, her middle forties to belong to some curious sect which practised polygamy. He remembered the strange, selfless aberrations of the Middle Ages, the calm bestialities of the seventeenth century and the odd privacies of modern prophets. He was careful to phrase his next question so that its meaning was not too definite.

  ‘These women in white—are they the wives?’

  ‘Oh, you have heard of them! How unexpected!’

  She gave a professional laugh which, under the circumstances, sounded shameless.

  ‘We have heard that Señor Carver has two hundred.’

  ‘That would be too many even for him, father. At the moment he has eighty-nine.’

  The Diocesan Visitor stared into the tired, greyish face. Her reserved eyes might have belonged to a nun, and he was startled to find that he could not meet them.

  ‘Who—who looks after this—er—family?’ he asked uneasily.

  ‘My cousin does. I care for the children.’

  ‘But is there not a—a chief wife, shall we say?’

  ‘No, father. We sell them when they are fifteen.’

  It was incredible. Heaven alone knew what mad heresy was at work among these defenceless Indians! The woman talked as if it were Christian and reasonable to have eighty-nine wives and sell them after … after … oh, ghastly thought!

  Even Don Felipe, though not without a shade of envy, was shocked. He decided to test the matter immediately, and beckoned to a smiling girl whose clumsy Indian figure was all turned to softness by her cotton sack.

  ‘Are you a wife of the white man?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I was.’

  ‘You have a husband?’

  ‘I am her husband,’ said a young man at her side.

  He leaned upon his digging stick, and regarded both his wife and Don Felipe with proud satisfaction.

  ‘You like her?’ enquired the administrator.

  ‘Yes! White man’s wives are the best! Many children! White man’s wives—’

  Don Felipe listened gravely to a flow of praise which would have been markedly indelicate in civilised society. The unnecessary details made it quite clear that girls who did not wear the white tunic were still sunk in the old tribal apathy, but that those who did wear it were enchanted by the attentions of husband and children.

  He permitted himself to remember that his own private life in his river settlement was extremely unsatisfactory. If only one could get Father Hilario out of the way, a conversation with Don Salomón might be profitable. Yet he felt instinctively that Carver’s transactions would be, in some way, far too individual to supply home comforts to lonely and deserving administrators.

  ‘Señor Carver will be glad that you can talk to the Icuari,’ said the sister.

  ‘You understand the language, too?’

  ‘Naturally. I think Señor Carver would wish you to come with me now,’ she added.

  ‘Magnificent! What patience! What devotion!’ exclaimed Don Felipe to cover his embarrassment.

  The track, gravelled like a garden path where the slope was steep and the mud slippery, led them up the other side of the saddle and on to a considerable plateau. Its extent could only be guessed, for the climate was still warm enough and damp enough for the taste of the Icuari and for trees; but here and there the forest had been cut and the bogs primitively drained, leaving glades of desolate beauty.

  As they entered the upper settlement, Carver, accompanied by a respectful retinue of men and women and the prancing gaieties of tiny children, came out to meet them. He had aged twenty years in nine, but was still recognisable: still a square, shortish man with a face like a hammered chunk of coarse-grained granite upon which some friend of the sculptor had drawn a burnt-cork moustache.

  If he had been attired in a string instead of a shirt and trousers, his build, Don Felipe realised, would have been exactly that of the Indians. No doubt the appearance of common humanity had helped his success. He was neither too slim nor too tall to be unfamiliar.

  ‘I must offer you my excuses. This friend—’ Ca
rver laid his hand on the shoulder of the guide—‘should have brought you straight to us instead of coming first to ask for permission. I have never forgotten, Don Felipe, that it was you who allowed me to live here.’

  An odd reason for gratitude, you would think—to be allowed to die slowly of heat and mildew. But one grew to be content with little. What was Don Felipe himself but an underweight bag of bones and bacteria in a yellow skin?

  He responded generously, quite conscious of his Spanish pleasure that there could be courtliness between two men at the world’s end, and one of them dressed in rags.

  ‘My distinguished friend! How should I not allow it? A man such as you wishing to study our country and its people! And now I have the honour to introduce to you Father Hilario, the representative of the Bishop of the Diocese.’

  It is indeed an honour,’ said Carver, with a scrupulous bow.

  ‘You are not, I believe, of the Church?’ Father Hilario asked.

  ‘Father, I fear the differences between one form of Christianity and another are—if I may say so without lack of respect—quite over the head of an anthropologist.’

  ‘But what, Don Salomón, do you teach?’

  ‘I came here to learn, not to teach,’ Carver answered. ‘But I must admit my hand has been forced. We will speak of it later. You must be very hungry.’

  Father Hilario was—and the business of satisfying a stomach which had been three-quarters empty for a week enabled him to control his indignation.

  Under a leaf shelter Carver and his two guests squatted on stools before pots of food which was dully unpalatable by any civilised standard, but far more nourishing than that of the forest tribes. The plateau grew corn and four different kinds of potato. From the lower slopes the Icuari had bananas and a little coarse rice. Don Salomón apologised for the absence of meat. They killed occasional birds and deer, but it was impossible to keep meat for more than a day or two in their climate. He might, he said, have experimented with cattle if the clearings had not been just within the range of the vampire bat.

  ‘But they do not look like a dying tribe now, would you say?’ he asked proudly.