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A Textile Traveler s Guide to Peru Bolivia Cynthia Lecount Samaké
Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector
Stephen C. Cote
Oil and Nation
A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector
Stephen C.
Cote
Copyright 2016 West Virginia University Press
All rights reserved
First edition published 2016 by West Virginia University Press
Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1
ISBN: cloth 978-1-943665-46-4 paper 978-1-943665-47-1 epub 978-1-943665-48-8 pdf 978-1-943665-49-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Cover design by Than Saffel
Cover image by Than Saffel
Introduction ix
1. Discovery: The Sucre Pioneers 1
2. Standard Oil and the Reshaping of Eastern Bolivia 30
3. Oil and the Chaco War 62
4. Oil and Nation 92
5. Oil and the Revolutionary State 121
6. Fall and Rise of the Oil State 140
Notes 155 Bibliography 183 Index 195
Figure 1. Bolivia, administrative divisions. (Washington, D.C., Central Intelligence Agency, 2006). Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Geography and Maps Division. G5321.F7 2006 .U5.
Figure 2. Bolivia, physical landscapes. (Washington, D.C., Central Intelligence Agency, 2006). Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Geography and Maps Division. G5320 2006 .U5.
introduction
In May 2006, Bolivian president Evo Morales renationalized his Andean country’s gas and oil reserves. He named the decree Heroes of the Chaco, invoking the indigenous soldiers of the Chaco War of the 1930s, who defended Bolivia’s petroleum fields from advancing Paraguayan troops. Morales declared to the nation and the world, “For more than 500 years our resources have been pillaged. This has to end now.”1 As the country’s first indigenous president, Morales understood the historical connections between Bolivia’s natu ral resources, Bolivian nationalism, and indigenous identity politics. He exploited historical constructions and memories of the Chaco War, of persistent economic dependency, and of the long indigenous strug gle for basic rights and dignity to build the polit ical c apital necessary to demand more from the hydrocarbon sector to fund his economic and social goals. Hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) hold special significance to Bolivians tod ay, as they are one of a cluster of commoditized natural resources, along with water and coca, that both galvanized social movements to overthrow the neoliberal regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in the Gas War of 2003 and set the stage for the historic election of Evo Morales in 2005.
I watched the Gas War unfold when I was a graduate student earning my master of arts at the University of Connecticut. I became captivated by the images of indigenous peasants and miners leaving their homes and work to encircle the La Paz basin to protest a proposed natural gas pipeline. The pipeline was not yet under construction, but Bolivians were out in the streets facing down their military. Dozens lost their lives. I learned how the pipeline protest was part of a larger historical strug gle to protect
x Oil and Nation
national resources from foreign companies, how the proposal to send the pipeline through Chile set off strong nationalist feelings against the country that had taken Bolivia’s seacoast in the late 1800s, and some of the ways in which the pipeline provoked emotional responses to racial and ethnic inequalities and injustices heightened by neoliberal economic policies enacted since the 1980s. I began to delve deeper into the role hydrocarbons have played in Bolivian history, which led to my 2011 dissertation at the University of California, Davis, and this book. Tod ay, hydrocarbons make up more than half the country’s exports—surpassing minerals by nearly 20 percent— demonstrating the need to write a comprehensive and dedicated study of the hydrocarbon sector and its historical context. 2 Tin, which made up more than half the country’s exports from the early 1900s unt il the 1980s, now accounts for just 4 percent. Much has been written about Bolivia’s tin, but oil’s story should now be added to the canon. Bolivia’s historic oil nationalizations help to clarify the connections between energy and society. The 2006 nationalization was not the first attempt by a Bolivian leader to harness the country’s oil for social purposes. It was, in fact, Bolivia’s third oil nationalization, although it was carried out in a di fferent form from the others, as I wil l explain in chapter 6. The first nationalization came in 1936 and 1937, when the post– Chaco War “military socialist” government, as they called themselves, formed a state oil company and canceled Standard Oil Company of Bolivia’s contract. The second was the expropriation of Gulf Oil properties in 1969. In this text, I will examine the nationalizations within a broader history of Bolivia’s oil sector. Oil, though not often associated with Bolivia, profoundly shaped the country’s social and natu ral landscapes beginning in the late nineteenth century. The development of Bolivia’s oil sector opened the eastern regions of the country to colonization and development, instigated the largest international war in twentieth-century Latin Amer ica, led to Latin Amer ica’s first nationalization of a major foreign company, and shaped the
Stephen C. Cote xi
Bolivian National Revolution of 1952. In 1954, Bolivia’s state oil company achieved energy independence for the country.
These dramatic events occurred during, and bec ause of, the global shift in energy regimes to oil. 3 The transition to petroleum reshaped power relationships around the world as countries integrated the new energy source into domestic markets, exportgrowth policies, and military machines, in some cases leading to the paradoxical “resource curse,” which triggered negative economic and polit ical effects in oil-producing countries.4 Oil, which powered machines, was also a source of economic and polit ical power. Nations that controlled oil reserves, refining processes, and supply chains grew in geostrategic importance, especially with the advent of mechanized warfare in the early twentieth century. As James Malloy and Eduardo Gamarra note in reference to Bolivia’s military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, “Because oil went to the heart of strategic questions and to critical notions of national security, the question was obviously of some significance to the military.”5 Less developed countries like Bolivia that possessed oil came to view the resource as a possible cure for their social ills as well. The potential for growth, modernization, and power from oil fired imaginations and fueled conflicts.6
An oil-based economy operates on a di fferent scale than previous energy regimes, as oil is more efficient and cleaner burning than wood or coal, although it is certainly not what we would consider to be “clean” energy. Oil-bas ed technologies “sped up felt time” by intensifying transportation, communication, and industrial development throughout the world.7 Oil-based technologies were, as John McNeill writes, “something new under the sun.”8
To be part of that emerging petroleum-based modernity, Bolivia had to secure access to sources of oil at home and abroad. The outcome of the strategic dependence on this new energy source had tremendous political a nd social consequences, including the Chaco War, the nationalization of Standard Oil, and the Revolution of 1952. Oil production also had environmental consequences
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for Bolivia, including reshaping of the eastern lowlands and urban landscapes, as well as melting glaciers due to climate change.
One of the most impor tant consequences of the transition to petroleum in Bolivia was the development of the eastern lowlands. Santa Cruz de la Sierra grew from a small frontier city on the eastern edge of the Andes in the first decades of the twentieth century to Bolivia’s largest city today. The development of the petroleum industry in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia also led to a cultural dissonance between easterners and western highland Bolivians, even as the oil itself physically integrated the regions. A consequence of this cultural difference in Santa Cruz is the presence of right-wing opposition to Evo Morales’s government. The opposition has used terms such as “productive” and “Western” to describe their outlook toward social and economic development, in contrast to the highlands, which become, in this discourse, “less productive” and “less Western.”9 The historically constructed racist overtones of this rhetor ic toward the majority indigenous highlanders, however, neglect to account for the large indigenous highland populations who inhabit Santa Cruz and work, productively, throughout the eastern lowland departments and the rest of the country; the institutional barriers that the indigenous peoples have faced in Bolivia and throughout the Amer icas since the arrival of Europeans; and the enormous economic obstacles confronting developing countries.
Regionalism and racism have determined internal polit ical dynamics in Bolivia since independence and help to define the colonial legacy of the area then known as Upper Peru. Rosanna Barragán explains the complicated relationship between Santa Cruz and La Paz as “an opposition of east and west, collas (from the Altiplano) and cambas (from the lowlands), indigenous peoples, whites and mestizos, tradition and modernity, collectivism and private initiative, peoples and oligarchs.”10 Barragán underscores the role of the central government in supporting the development of the lowland departments through increased revenues from
Stephen C. Cote xiii
mineral extraction after 1938 by state oil and mining companies, turning on its head the argument from Santa Cruz autonomistas (those advocating regional autonomy) that the state has blocked lowland development and takes too much revenue from the resource-rich lowland departments. She accurately points out, however, that the hydrocarbon wealth is not legally the property of the department where it resides but of the state.
While demonstrating the importance of hydrocarbon revenues from the state to Santa Cruz after 1938, Barragán does not adequately explain the origins of the polit ical differences between east and west before that period. The roots of east–west divisions, I argue, can be found in the built landscapes of roads and oil camps constructed by Standard Oil Company in the 1920s and 1930s. Geography shaped the approach taken by Standard Oil in its development strategy and, subsequently, the construction of eastern Bolivian cultures that gazed away from the western highlands and the large Aymara and Quechua populations that reside there, and toward the Western Eu ropea n and North American capitalist markets. In that way, the east identified more with prevailing ideas of global capitalist i ntegration. Others wanted to protect Bolivia’s natu ral resources from continued foreign exploitation, which had increased the country’s economic (and polit ical) dependency on the developed capitalist nations. While shaping the eastern lowlands, oil instigated the largest international war in Latin Amer ica in t he twentieth century. The Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s was a pivotal moment in Bolivia’s history that “made the Revolution of 1952 inevitable.”11 I have argued that the conflict was a war for oil, though not in the ways in which it has been depicted.12 The need for the increasingly strategic resource drove Bolivia eastward toward the Paraguay River to gain an outlet to export oil across the Atlantic Ocean. The defense of the oil fields during the war, despite the loss of significant territory, gave Bolivians a victory on which to build their nation after the war. Still, as James Dunkerly
xiv Oil and Nation
argues, the “sense of common betrayal, shared suffering, a Manichaean vision of cowardice and heroism, a generational divide and ideological displacement compounded by the collective trauma of defeat in war,” drove reform efforts in the postwar period that culminated in the National Revolution of 1952.13
Oil contributed to the Chaco War and its aftermath in other ways. First, the demand for oil during war time changed the perceptions of many about the wisdom of granting concessions to foreign companies, especially when Standard Oil declared neutrality in the conflict and did not increase production for the war effort. Second, the site of the oil fields, at first far from the front lines, became a strategic target for advancing Paraguayan troops and the focus of debates during peace negotiations. And third, the geography, climate, and diseases of the oil regions contributed to Bolivia’s losses, as did the racial constructs that permeated the oil fields and front lines. Bolivia’s entrenched oligarchy of mine owners and hacienda owners in La Paz, known collectively as the rosca, seemed out of touch with the country and its mostly indigenous populations, leading to demands for social changes after the war. The historiography and literature of the Chaco War in the 1930s and 1940s was highly critical of the liberal economic and polit ical order that the authors of dozens of novels, poems, and autobiographies blamed not only for the war but for all of Bolivia’s polit ical, social, and economic problems.14
Oil and the role it played during and after the Chaco War shaped the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952. Scholars have written much about the role of miners and indigenous peasants in the revolution, and for good reason. Tin miners and indigenous peasants had strug gled in the highlands for decades to improve their living and working conditions and to gain basic rights, such as access to education. Many scholars have studied the struggle of the highland indigenous peoples in Bolivia over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring attention to a sector formerly portrayed as passive subjects exploited by
Stephen C. Cote xv
landowners, mine owners, and the state.15 Laura Gotkowitz broadened the scope of this work and demonstrated that indigenous groups throughout the highlands were instrumental in the Revolution of 1952, while acknowledging their limits to social mobility after the revolution. Others, such as James Dunkerly, studied the role of labor unions—and especially the Trotskyite tin miners— in the revolution. Robert Alexander notes the revolutionary links forged in the mining camps, reminding us that indigenous peoples worked in the mines as well as on the land and maintained connections between the two worlds, which grew in importance during the revolution.
I argue that oil also shaped the revolution. Indians and miners, and Indian miners, fought the army in the highlands in April 1952 and achieved a quick victory over the military and the La Paz oligarchy. But the midd le-class Chaco War veterans who controlled the revolutionary state apparatus believed that oil, and not tin, would provide the economic base for Bolivia’s fut ure. Economic independence drove early revolutionary policy and discourse, with the first president, economist Víctor Paz Estenssoro, saying, “If the government of the national revolution can consolidate itself with a sufficient economic and social base, the reactionaries, the Rosca , and their servants wil l have lost all hope of returning to power in Bolivia.”16 But attempts to reconcile the demands of the revolutionary miners with the moderate vision of the party leaders contributed to further instability and eventual conflict.
If the Chaco War was a war for oil, and the Chaco War made the revolution “inevitable,” then we should look at the role oil played in the revolution. Together, the importance of oil to the Chaco War and its outcome; the actual and mythological role of the state oil company in the postwar years as part of the reformist, nationalist, and revolutionary discourse; and the significance of oil to the revolutionary state form a largely untold story. While major social achievements did take place after 1952, the revolutionary state decapitalized the new state mining company and
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took a tepid approach toward an agrarian reform forced on it by peasants seeking long overdue social justice, but it enthusiastically funded oil exploration, fi rst with the state oil company and then by opening the sector to foreign companies to increase production. Leftists such as Guillermo Lora decried the latter act as “nationselling.”17
While focusing on oil, omitting either the mining sector or the indigenous populations would ignore the largest segment of state revenues in the twentieth century and the majority of the country’s population. To do so would also provide an incomplete story of the oil sector. Oil policy grew out of mining codes and experience with mining and other natu ral resource extraction, while the struggle by indigenous populations for land, education, and political inclusion shaped economic development policies and warped the country’s hierarchical social structure. If mining and the struggles of the indigenous populations are so impor tant to Bolivian history, then why focus on oil? Oil hastened transformations in rural indigenous communities, urban built environments, and the mining economy. Oil contributed to regional, racial, and other persistent political, social, and economic divisions. Elite anxiety over the majority indigenous populations and the distinct geography of the landlocked Andean country heightened the sense of urgency to develop the resource. Th is anxiety, combined with Bolivia’s impoverished condition, built the foundations for war, nationalization, and revolution that are discussed here. Oil became so impor tant to the country that it nationalized this resource fi rst, before the tin mines, even though mining was by far the largest source of state revenue at the time; this has to do with both the nature of oil and the political power of the oligarchy, the rosca. Oil was necessary to develop domestic industry and to build military strength. Bolivia’s mining equipment, electricity generation, trains, tractors, and automobiles required oil or coal, but coal was mostly absent from Latin Amer ica. For marginal Bolivia to become a
Stephen C. Cote xvii
modern nation, it needed to break the stranglehold of the rosca, and it needed oil.
Bolivia in Historical Context
Bolivia’s extraordinary and complex history is woven through with the majority indigenous populations and the country’s rich natu ral resource base. The Spanish Empire extracted silver from the mountain at the famed Imperial City of Potosí in colonial Upper Peru using Natives in corvée labor regimens called “mitas,” after Incan practices. Many thousands of Indians died in the mines while the silver went overseas to finance a warring and frequently bankrupt empire. The silver began to run out in the late eighteenth century, contributing to economic decline in the central Andes and growing unrest among the indigenous peoples and the Creoles (those of Europea n descent born in the Americas). The long and brutal wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, following on the heels of the Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari revolts in the late eighteenth century, devastated the area of Upper Peru that became Bolivia, named for the liberator Simón Bolívar after the wars.18 A decade of fighting across the Altiplano— the high exposed plains over thirteen thousand feet in altitude between the eastern and western ranges of the Andes—laid waste to villages, farmlands, and animal herds, while the mines flooded. It took the fledgling nation of Bolivia decades to recover.
In the nineteenth century, Bolivia faced obstacles to growth the size of the Andes Mountains, which divided the country in two. The new republic did not possess the financial resources to restart the mines or to develop other industry. Transporting goods over the Andes by mule and llama was costly, time consuming, and dangerous. Much of the northern and eastern territory was unmapped, sparsely inhabited, and controlled by autonomous indigenous groups that had never been conquered by Spain. In the
late nineteenth century, Bolivia lost its seacoast in a war with Chile that left the country landlocked and even more geographical ly isolated. The introduction of steam-powered technology in the late nineteenth century allowed silver mines to reopen and invigorate an economy based unt il then on an Indian head tax. Silver mining began to slowly revive the economy in the 1860s, followed by a short-lived rubber boom and then tin mining. Railroads ran west to the Pacific to export ore, haciendas grew and encroached on traditional communal lands throughout the highlands, and ethnic tensions rose.
Bolivia was a poor country in the 1800s. The majority indigenous populations living on Bolivia’s Altiplano and in the central highlands worked the land and the mines in neocolonia l and semifeudal conditions, as their ancestors had done for centuries. Indigenous peoples struggled with the state and local landowners for land and basic rights, negotiated changing social conditions, and survived, while a small group of white and mestizo elites, descendants of the European colonists, ran the government in favor of the interests of the mines and haciendas that they owned. Tod ay, nearly two-thi rds of Bolivia’s populations identify themselves as indigenous. The two major indigenous language groups are the Quechua and Aymara of the Bolivian highlands, who constitute more than 50% of Bolivia’s ten million inhabitants.19 Thirty other ethnic groups live scattered throughout Bolivia’s vast lowland territories. The Chiriguanos are the majority ethnic group in the lowlands.20
Nineteenth-century Bolivian politics mirrored trends throughout Latin Amer ica, where liberal and conservative caudillos (regional strongmen) battled for control of the executive branch of government. In Bolivia, there was lit tle to distinguish the Conservative Party from the opposition Liberal Party. They were both exclusive parties of white elites with similar policy objectives, which we would identify as classic liberal economics. Both parties focused on expanding the mining sector, building infrastructure
Stephen C. Cote xix
to export ore to the Pacific Ocean, and gaining control over the large communal indigenous landholdings in the highlands, which they labeled unproductive. Through corruption and occasional violence, the Conservatives held on to power in the capital city, Sucre, after the resurgence of the silver-min ing economy in the 1860s. The frustrated Liberals eventually orga niz ed a rebellion. The 1899 Federalist Revolution of the Liberal Party ended Conservative rule and shifted both economic and polit ical power north to La Paz and the tin mines.21 Tin became the major export and primary source of government revenues in the early twentieth century as silver declined, though the Indian head tax remained an impor tant source of revenue for decades. The Liberals, and offshoot parties who called themselves Republicans and Genuine Republicans, held power in La Paz unt il the midd le of the 1930s. During that period, Bolivians discovered oil in the sub-Andes.
The Cenozoic-era A ndean uplift that slowly drained the Atlantic Ocean eastward and left the Amazon Basin behind gave South America its present topography.22 In between the high mountains and the expansive lowlands were the geographical ly complex foothills of the eastern sub-Andes, a chain of north–south mountain ranges compressed by power ful geological forces into deep creases scrunched like an accordion. The oil was entombed for millennia under impervious layers of rock, referred to by petroleum geologists as capstone, deep inside the sub-Andean zone. According to one geologist, the zone is “characterized by persistent longitudinal, overthrust asymmetrical anticlines that have eroded to a distinctive topography of parallel ridges and valleys.”23 Anticlines are domed formations coveted by petroleum geologists, but the subAndean terrain is difficult to traverse due to the thick vegetation and steep-walled valleys. Even tod ay, few roads connect eastern Bolivia to the west, and those that do endure flooding and mudslides throughout the rainy season, making access to the oil regions challenging and costly. East of the sub-Andean zone and south of the Amazon Basin lies the Gran Chaco, a grassy and
wooded savanna classified as dry tropical forest that crosses the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina.24 The sandy and clay soils of the Bolivian Chaco washed down from the Andes over millennia, leaving poor growing conditions for the indigenous groups that had migrated there. The Native peoples fished, hunted, and gathered edible plants in their dispersed communities.
Oil traveled upward through the faults and cracks of the subAndean geography and out to the surface of the deep canyons and hillsides, where people discovered it and found uses for it. Natives smeared the oil on themselves and on their animals to heal wounds. They ingested it to cure sicknesses. They used it to light torches and to light the ends of the arrows they fired at their enemies’ huts. Spanish conquistadores knew of Bolivia’s oil, as did ranchers in later times. This story begins in 1896, when a medical doctor, on a secret government mission, discovered an oil spring and started a kerosene company with the intention of bringing Bolivia out of the darkness of poverty and backwardness and into a modern enlightened world.
Overview by Chapter
Chapter 1 questions how the experiences of Bolivia’s petroleum pioneers shaped the direction of oil policy, while analyzing the obstacles the pioneers faced developing a viable oil sector. The attempts by the pioneers to find and exploit oil exposed them to the diverse geography, biota, cultures, and polit ical persuasions of this landlocked Andean country. Bec ause of this, the chapter serves as an introduction to Bolivian history and to the formation of oil nationalism. The petroleum pioneers were mostly Bolivian and Chilean, although others, including Eu ropeans a nd North Americans, found their way into the remote southeastern oil zones. Many were speculators, but some, like Dr. Manuel Cuéllar of Sucre, had serious intent to develop viable petroleum enterprises. None imagined the difficulties that awaited them, which serve to
Stephen C. Cote xxi
demonstrate some of the structural problems that have thwarted Bolivian economic development. While domestic businessmen struggled to drill oil, the country’s leaders focused mostly on their personal mining and land interests in the highlands, ignoring a sector with the potential to transform the nation. Those who lambasted the government for this oversight became the forebears of Bolivian oil nationalism, the sentiment behind using oil to build the nation.
Chapter 2 examines the ways in which John D. Rockefel ler’s Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) was able to gain control over Bolivia’s most impor tant oil concessions, and the ways in which its activities constructed new landscapes and identities in eastern Bolivia. The isolated oil regions built connections to the outside world through the transportation and communication infrastructure erected by the oil company. New businesses arose to ser vice the oil camps, and cultural influences from outside found their way into the isolated Bolivian Oriente (East). Eastern Bolivians began to construct separate and distinct identities from the western highlanders. And as the state began to pay more attention to the east and the oil sector as demand for oil grew during the 1920s, conflicts between the state and Standard Oil also grew, as the oil company, with di fferent priorities than Bolivia, did not meet that demand. The tensions reached a breaking point with the collapse of the tin market at the onset of the Great Depression. Political a nd legal battles stretched on for decades and created more divisions, not only between the state and Standard Oil but also between the eastern lowlands, where the oil was located, and the western highlands, where the government, increasingly seen by the eastern regions as either neglectful or obstructionist, was centered. Oil nationalism in the east took on different tones than oil nationalism in the west, although both regions had gra nd ideas about oil’s potential to build the nation.
Chapter 3 asks how the Chaco War was, and was not, a war for oil, and questions the ways in which petroleum shaped the
conduct and outcomes of the war. The chapter reexamines the causes of the war, discusses the oil politics, and reveals the development of social movements that agitated for nationalization of the oil reserves. Bolivians discovered the strategic and social significance of their oil during the campaign as motorized vehicles sped into the Chaco Boreal, as Paraguayans advanced toward the oil camps, and as Bolivians—mostly indigenous highland conscripts— shed blood defending the oil reserves. The war remade the country’s oil into a sacred symbol of the nation. The war also fundamentally reshaped relationships between the indigenous highlanders and the state, labor relations, and the role of the state in the economy.
Chapter 4 examines the ways in which the foundation of the state oil company and the cancellation of Standard Oil’s contract transformed the role played by the state in the oil sector. As the post-Chaco governments seesawed between reformers and the traditional oligarchy, the semiautonomous state oil company accomplished remarkable achievements in the areas of production and distribution. The experience demonstrated that Bolivians could do a better job at exploiting the country’s resources than could a foreign company, bolstering the prestige and influence of the oil nationalists. But to demonstrate that point, the state oil company had to overcome tremendous internal divisions, which foreshadowed the revolutionary state’s problems running the country.
Chapter 5 discusses the role oil played in the National Revolution of 1952. While the tin miners who fought in the revolution achieved their goal of nationalizing the large tin mines, the revolutionary state defunded the new state mining company in favor of the state oil company. Tin revenues bolstered oil exploration and distribution networks to the culmination in 1954 of Bolivian energy independence. The state oil company not only satisfied domestic demand but also began exporting small quantities of oil. Oil also became a tool for the revolutionary state to gain credit from international lenders, but using oil as a bargaining chip allowed the United States to gain influence and enact loan
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xxiii conditions that threatened the state oil company, oil nationalists, and the revolution itself.
Chapter 6 is a brief overview of the hydrocarbon sector from 1956 to the present. The active role played by the state in the hydrocarbon sector continued to divide eastern lowlanders from La Paz over the distribution of revenues and control of the reserves. The chapter examines the ways in which the fight over control of the oil reserves shaped conflicts that continue to divide the country. The conclusion sums up the importance of oil to understanding the regional, polit ical, racial, and environmental conflicts that mark Bolivia’s landscape today. Even as the hydrocarbon resources have given the state the means to fund social programs, improve its international economic standing, and diversify its economic base, the state oil company requires new sources of oil and natural gas in order to continue to serve this role, putting the state at odds with populations, usually poor and indigenous, affected by extraction.
chapter 1
Discovery
The Sucre Pioneers
Dr. Manuel Cuéllar read and reread the letter from his brother, José, with alarm. The year was 1896 in Bolivia’s capital city, Sucre, located at nine thousand feet in a beautiful valley in the central eastern Andes. José was living in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, as a fugitive from justice after murdering a Chilean diplomat whom he had accused of having an affair with his wife.1 José had written the letter in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire spoken by José and Manuel’s mot her and still spoken by 30 percent of Bolivia’s population. He used Quechua to hide the letter’s contents from the Paraguayans, few of whom would have understood the Andean language. José warned his brother of Paraguayan troops crossing into Bolivian territory in the lowland plains of the Chaco Boreal, an area in dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay since the middle of the nineteenth century. Dr. Cuéllar decided to act on the information.
Cuéllar, like his fat her, was a surgeon trained in Paris. Also like his father, who had seen action in the Bolivian military, Cuéllar had a strong sense of nationalism in a country that was deeply divided by race, ethnicity, class, and region. Nationalism, according to social anthropologist and theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner, is “a polit ical principle, which holds that the polit ical and national unit should be congruent.”2 Bolivia was anything but. A majority indigenous country, the indigenous people had been
marginalized, subjugated, and discriminated against since long before the founding of the republic. Most of Bolivia is lowland tropics, but most of the population live in the central valleys and high plains of the Andes Mountains. The cultural and geographic diversity led to isolated, separate, and competing regions and identities, while the minority ethnic and racial rule led to persistent violence and conflict. Gellner went on to define nationalist sentiment as “the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle [nationalism], or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfillment.” Few Bolivians felt satisfaction at the state of their country in the late nineteenth century. Some would orga nize into nationalist movements, defined, again by Gellner, as “actuated by a sentiment of this kind [nationalist].” The nationalist movements included groups formed by Dr. Cuéllar and his patriotic sucreño (residents of Sucre) brethren.
Dr. Cuéllar hoped to cure his nation of its many social and biological ills. In 1895, along with other doctors and faculty of Sucre’s prestigious San Francisco Xavier University, Cuéllar founded a medical institute. The institute contained the country’s first bacteriological laboratory at a time when many still questioned germ theory. Doctors at the laboratory developed vaccines that greatly improved health conditions in Sucre’s department of Chuquisaca, a large area stretching from the Andes to the southeastern lowlands.3 The institute also had scientific sections for metallurgy, astronomy, and chemistry, and a library that can still be visited. As the Instituto Médico Sucre (Sucre Medical Institute) began its difficult task of improving Bolivia with the latest medical science, Cuéllar became consumed with stopping Paraguay from threatening the country’s territorial integrity. He saw both missions as having the same ultimate goal of building a strong and modern Bolivia.
Bolivia had suffered a major territorial loss just fifteen years earlier in the War of the Pacific. Chile took Bolivia’s nitrate-rich department on the Pacific coast, leaving the country landlocked.
Losing territory to Paraguay in the east would have been painful with the lingering memory of the stinging loss to Chile in the west. Dr. Cuéllar decided to take his brother’s letter to Bolivia’s president, Mariano Baptista Caserta (in office 1892–1896), and offered to lead an expedition disguised as a scientific mission to verify the alleged Paraguayan intervention.4 The president referred the matter to his Council of Ministers, which approved the expedition but provided lit tle funding. The doctor would pay most of the costs for the supplies, guides, and mules out of his own pocket.
Although the Council of Ministers was certainly concerned about the Paraguayans, Bolivia had few resources to contribute to the mission. The silver-mining economy of the famed mountain of Cerro Rico at Potosí, which had helped feed the coffers of the Spanish Empire in the colonial era, had collapsed during the wars for independence in the early 1800s. The mines had filled with water and would require heavy capital investment to drain them. New steam-powered technology drove a resurgence of mining in Potosí and throughout Latin America in t he latter half of the nineteenth century. In Sucre—the administrative center for the mines of Potosí— a par ticularly self-awa re group of elites arose, who modeled themselves on high Europea n culture.5 But by 1896, when Dr. Cuéllar began the expedition east from Sucre, the silver ore was again depleted, along with the country’s treasury, and the elite became much less self-assu red.
The expedition spent weeks crossing the arduous terrain of the sub-Andean mountains, composed of ten thickly forested chains running from north to south between Sucre and the lowland plains of the Chaco Boreal. While lush and beautiful, travel across the mountains was challenging. Hardly any roads ran through the deep valleys or along the steep ridges, and those that did would wash out in the rainy season, which varies greatly in intensity between November and April. Few towns existed in the area, and many of the indigenous populations shunned outsiders as a result of missionary activity and colonization over the centuries that had
violently encroached on their lands and introduced devastating epidemics. A series of missions ran like a line of forts along the frontal range of the sub-Andes and protected colonizers from groups such as the Tobas and Matacos, who controlled much of the area.6 Some indigenous people took advantage of the missions and the ser vices that they provided. Coincidentally, the line of missions would closely mirror the later location of oil camps. Natives attacked Cuéllar’s expedition on the edge of the Chaco near the town of D’Orbigny, named for the French scientist who had explored the region earlier in the nineteenth century and provided its first paleontological and geological studies. Cuéllar retreated to Sucre without learning of any Paraguayan advance into the disputed territory, although the topic would recur unt il war broke out in the 1930s.
The trip back must have been even more challenging. The group, dejected at their failure, had to climb thousands of feet up primitive trails into the subtropical forests. Some of the mules developed sores from carry ing the heavy loads over the poorly maintained paths. Dr. Cuéllar’s guides suggested a remedy. The cambas a general term for people living in eastern Bolivia—showed the doctor a nearby spring with a dark viscous liquid oozing from the ground.7 They applied the liquid to the sores to help them heal. Dr. Cuéllar suspected that the substance was petroleum and brought samples back with him for testing.
Laboratory analysis confirmed that the substance was petroleum and of a high quality. Dr. Cuéllar gathered investors to start Bolivia’s first oil company. Like the medical institute and the mission to defend Bolivia’s territorial integrity, the oil company had a grander nationalist scope. Cuéllar and his partners hoped to modernize their country with the petroleum they had discovered (or, more accurately, been shown). The other investors also lived in Sucre and participated in scientific and civic organizations, such as Sucre’s Geographical Society. Many had been educated in Europe and influenced by contemporary pseudoscientific concepts, such as
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through education (he endowed and encouraged learning quite handsomely), he stultified all the effects of his liberality by conceding to hereditary prejudice the whole conduct of his government. He did not walk with the world, in fact, and so it walked into him.
The Palace, in the meanwhile, was as sumptuous within as it was bare without. Mr Trix, entering towards it, one fine September morning, by the gates opening from the Piazzo Castello, tasted, in some curious anticipation, the possible flavour of the fruit hidden behind that uncompromising rind. He was “waiting,” by private “command,” on his sovereign, and the occasion (the first of its kind to him) found him by no means so possessed by its importance as that his self-possession was moved thereby to yield an iota of its serenity. He was received, with consideration, at a private door to which he was directed, and, after the slightest delay, ushered straight into the presence of Victor-Amadeus.
The monarch was seated at a secretaire, heavily gilt and with painted panels, talking or dictating to a little fat, bedizened aide-decamp, who wrote apart at a littered table, and who was so buried in bullion that he might have been taken for the First Lord of the Treasury just emerged from a dip into one of its coffers. The royal toilet itself was a négligé—dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and bare close-cropped head—all very gimp and finical. Shrewd, wizened, narrow, Victor-Amadeus’s face—a dough-white, flexuousnosed, long-chinned, under-jawed little affair—perked up from its collar of white ermine like a beedy-eyed condor’s. Thought was engraved on it in a number of thready wrinkles, like cracks in parchment. The deepest owed themselves to profound selfsearchings on such questions as the conduct of Court precedents, of royal hunts, of ceremonial and pageantry. The slightest might record some difficult moments accorded to the size of a button, or the claims of the subversive shoe-tie over the constitutional buckle, To find the royal countenance simply vacant was to know the royal mind concentrated on affairs of State.
Those might include the potentialities of the Lottery, the friendship of Cousin Louis of France, a new uniform for the army. It is certain that they never excluded the necessity of some new drain upon the exchequer. Victor-Amadeus recognised very clearly that the true
evolution of man is in his clothes. And he was right in a way It seems impossible to advocate even so much, or so little, as a return to Nature without wanting to dress up to the part. He was a petitmâitre, in short, of the first rank and the most fastidious taste, who had spent his reigning life in offering himself a leading example of refinement to his subjects. He was something better than a benevolent Caligula.
He went on dictating now, while Mr Trix, standing just within the doorway by which he had entered, awaited passively his royal pleasure.
“Write, my dear Polisson,” said the King, “that, as regards the Pont Beauvoisin over the Guier, we cannot consent to the abolition of the double toll. To leave Savoy may be a necessity; to enter France may be necessity; but two necessities do not make one privilege. On the other hand, two privileges make a certain necessity—that of paying for both.”
The gilded scribe raised his head and little screw-eyes. M. Polisson was terribly short-sighted, but was forbidden the use of spectacles because of their ugliness.
“I must recall to your Majesty,” he said: “that the petition dates from Dauphiny.”
“Chou pour chou,” said the King. “Would it rob me the less, because it would also rob King Louis of his half of the perquisites? To concede it would be to concede the first principle of the octroi. The keystone is a small part of the arch; but remove it, and what then! Tell me that, M. Polisson.”
The secretary still ventured a deferential protest.
“Your Majesty’s duchy of Savoy is ultramontane. It is perhaps infected a little through its contiguity with revolutionary doctrines. Its predilections, as your Majesty knows, have always been for French arms, French arts, French sentiments. It may happen to have imbibed some of the worthless with the sound. A little concession to unrest would not make unrest more unrestful.”
The King took snuff from a jewelled box.
“That was a clumsy iteration, my charming Polisson,” said he. “But all concessions are an admission of weakness. If we slacken the curb, we shall presently be run away with. Be careful of that pouncet-
box, or you will spill it on the carpet and make an unpleasant dust. Besides, it was given me by a very pretty child, and I love children.”
“But, sire—”
“Say no more, M. Polisson. Is the document prepared?”
All the while he was talking, the corner of his eye was given to Mr Trix. Now he turned a little, and said quite suddenly, “That is a very pretty idea of the earrings, Monsieur.”
So he would pass, butterfly-like on unsteady wings, from blossom to blossom of a flowery mind. There was some purpose, no doubt, ahead of his irrelative flittings, but it seemed for ever the prey to distractions by the way.
His allusion was to a certain novelty in dandyism, it appeared—to a couple of little diamonds which were let into the gold earrings worn by his visitor. For the rest, that visitor, it was obvious, attracted his most flattering regard. He observed, with admiration, his coat and breeches of fine buff cloth and fastidiously elegant cut; his tambour vest of white satin sprigged with silver, and his white silk stockings; his mushroom-coloured stock, and solitaire of broad black silk which was tied in a bow at the back of his natural black hair, and brought over his shoulders to hold a miniature framed in diamonds and turquoises; his silver-headed Malacca cane looped to the right wrist, and the tiny Nivernois hat held under his left arm; the slim steelhilted sword at his hip (for continental “bloods” still held to a fashion which was grown out-of-date in England); his neat black pantoufles fastened with little gold-tagged laces—and only as to these last did his countenance express any doubt or qualification.
Still admiring, he arose from his chair. At the same moment M. Polisson skipped to his feet and fell over a stool. The King glanced at him vexedly.
“You are always the one, little Polisson,” he said, “to cough in the exquisite moment of the opera.”
Then he advanced to the visitor, very winningly.
“It is all a triumph of taste, Monsieur,” he said. “Accept the congratulations of a sympathetic spirit.”
Cartouche bowed profoundly.
“I have the good fortune of seeing M. Trix?” said the King; “the protégé of our late lamented Marquis? It is a pleasure of which I
have often dreamed, and now realise to my instruction. You were very attached to your patron, Monsieur?”
“I returned his regard for me, Sire, with duty and affection.”
“He is a great loss to us. We had looked upon him as a bulwark against the licentious encroachments of the age. He would have found for your modern Rousseaus poor quarters at Chambéry—or at Le Prieuré, for that matter. No question of subversive petitions, had he remained alive. It was a pity he was so appallingly ugly. I am not sure about the laces, monsieur. They are a little democratic.”
“They have gold tags, Sire,” was all that Trix could find to answer “True,” said the King, “and that perhaps redeems them, like the jewel in the toad’s head. I understand, Monsieur, that the widow is as great a beauty as she is a fortune.”
Cartouche sniggered to himself, dogging these apparently inconsequent “doublings” of the royal mind.
“She is priceless in every way, Sire.”
The King looked at him rather keenly.
“It would want a courageous man,” he said, “to aspire to the priceless.”
Cartouche smiled, in a state of inner astonishment. To what end, of favour or correction, was all this irrelevance of the royal flibbertigibbet addressed? Knowing his own reputation in Turin, he could hardly flatter himself with a thought of promotion. And the next remark of the monarch only deepened his perplexity.
“Have you ever heard, Monsieur,” said Victor-Amadeus, “of a secret society calling itself the Illuminati?”
“Surely, Sire,” answered the visitor, profoundly bewildered. “It is, by general report, a fellowship of star-gazers, who, consulting the heavenly systems, flounder among the earthly.”
“Ay,” said the King: “and they meet at night, as astrologers should —here and there, on dark hill-sides, on remote roads, on lonely wastes. But doubtless you know that?”
“I know nothing whatever about their habits, Sire.”
“So?—I think, Monsieur, but I am not sure, that these ruffles might be doubled. Perhaps, however, it would vulgarise, in the tiniest degree, the exquisite simplicity of your conception. My faith! what Goths we have to educate, artists like you and me! Hopeless to
expect their appreciation of these delicate nuances of taste and selection. The many-flounced flower is always foremost in their approval. Sometimes, in despair, I feel that I must yield the eternal conflict—go mad in pea-green stockings and a scarlet wig. But then I think how Nature, in her inaccessible eyries, continues to produce, without a didactic thought, her tastefullest forms; and I am comforted, because I recognise that the final appeal of elegance is to the gods. Has it ever occurred to you, Monsieur, that your patron was murdered by these Illuminati?”
The sudden swerve and swoop brought a gasp from Cartouche, verily as if his Majesty had whipped a hand from behind his back and struck him in the wind. He was, momentarily, quite staggered.
“No, never,” he could only ejaculate.
Victor-Amadeus conned him curiously.
“Admit, Monsieur, for the sake of argument, that it were so,” he said. “How, then, would you regard this Brotherhood?”
“Sire, as your Majesty regarded the Jesuits.”
“What! as a canker to be cut from us, lest it should come to corrupt the whole body of our estate?” The King scraped his chin thoughtfully. “I have heard said,” he murmured, “that of all compelling personalities, that of the fire-eater dilettante, the truculent wit, the gaillard with his tongue in his scabbard and venom at its point, is the most to be admired for its penetration, since it will pierce through both steel and brain. (I shall certainly adopt this inspiration of the earrings, Monsieur.) We are fortunate, at least, in recognising in M. Trix—with whose exploits in Turin report has made us familiar—the qualities of his reputation. Courageous, brilliant men, men of resource and daring, men even remorseless vengeurs at discretion, are not to be gathered like edelweiss at the expense of a little risk and trouble. And so La Prieuré has its Illuminati, Monsieur?”
“I learn it, for the first time, of your Majesty.”
“A convenient observatory, M. Trix, for the studying of systems— wild, remote, high-lifted—a place for storing thunderbolts, and launching them. It would need a man, to circumvent and storm it, almost as courageous as he who should aspire to the priceless. Well, di Rocco—though terribly ugly—was that man, on both counts,
and he is dead. But Nemesis, if we are not mistaken, bore a child to him. Will you be our Prefect of Faissigny, M. Trix?”
“My God, Sire!”
The offer was so sudden, so unexpected, that he could utter no more on the instant. The King—a disciple, perhaps, of Walpole in the baser part of his policy—hastened to clinch an appointment he had set his heart on. Munificence happened to be the price he could bid for it, and without his being a penny the poorer thereby. He spoke on eagerly, eschewing hyperbole.
“We are not unacquainted, Monsieur, with the minutest circumstances of that tragedy, or of some local meetings of the Brotherhood which, in our opinion, were responsible for it. The Marquess was, of all men, calculated to be abhorrent to these wouldbe subverters of the constitution, whose aims are by no means so astral or so harmless as you would appear to believe. That they, and their pernicious doctrines, are not unrepresented in Faissigny I can well tell you. From the Col-de-Balme to Bonneville they have their secret rallying-points. The place is blotched with corruption. It needs a strong man, a man of local knowledge, whether inspired by vengeance, or by duty, or by both, to put his knife to those tainted parts. I had thought of M. de France in my difficulty. Bah! he is an old pompous vanity. I will quiet him with a little portfolio. In the meanwhile—”
“But, Sire!”
“In the meanwhile, I say, we can conceive of no better man than yourself to instruct vulgarity of the fallacy of ugliness. We do not expect M. Trix, the exquisite, the man of the sword, to condemn himself, unrewarded, to a virtual exile from life, as he regards it. We have had a little bird to whisper in our ears; and, as a consequence, we propose to endow our Prefect of Faissigny with a fine local estate, and a fine fortune, encumbered only with the condition of a wife. In short, Monsieur, we offer to bestow upon our faithful lieutenant the hand of the widowed lady di Rocco.”
Cartouche dropped his hat, picked it up, straightened himself, laughed a little laugh, and answered. His face was white and his lips were trembling.
“Pardon me, Sire; but that is impossible.”
Victor-Amadeus stared a little; then spoke drily
“You may misconceive our prerogatives, Monsieur. Or, perhaps, you are married already?”
“No, Sire.”
“It is well, then. We have commanded the lady and her father to Court—a little prematurely, maybe; but, what would you!” (he shrugged his shoulders). “A loveless marriage makes a short mourning. In the meantime—”
“I will be your Prefect, Sire—if not for vengeance’ sake, for duty alone.”
“You do not believe he was murdered?”
“The suggestion shall at least stimulate me.”
“And nothing else? But we will see. A stake in that country would afford you a strong personal interest in its cleansing. We will see, we will see.” He turned to his secretary. “Make out M. Trix’s patent as Prefect of Faissigny, my dear Polisson,” he said; “and, for heaven’s sake, straighten your stock.”
CHAPTER VI
W a stone’s throw of the royal Palace, under its usurious eye, as it were, stood the Palazzo di Citta, the headquarters of the Banco del Regio Lotto. There, every alternate Saturday at noon, the drawing of the numbers took place, and the impoverishment of a few thousand King’s subjects, guilty of nothing but fatuity, was decided by lot.
It was a recurrently mad time, whose agitation was transmitted to remotest parishes all over the country—only with this distinction: the Piémontais, watching the central game, was held hostage to its excitement; the poor Savoyard, ruined out of sight, cursed himself for a blockhead victim to fraud, and, with the common inconsistency, vowed hatred against a Government which could thus rob him of his mite.
That was inevitable. Gambling in cold blood can only breed usurers where it succeeds, and desperadoes where it fails. The Turinois possessed the glitter of the table. It was not he who was to fail the Monarchy in the dark days to come.
He was as fevered, as voluble, as gesticulatory, as seething in his numbers on this particular occasion of the drawing, as he had been any time since M. D’Aubonne first brought his damnable invention of the lottery-wheel from France some fifty years earlier. His cheek was as glowing, his heart as fluttering with a sense of novelty, as if he had never before seen a hundred or two of butterflies broken on the wheel. Even Dr Bonito, standing amidst the pack with a young friend, felt the infection of the occasion, and bit his blue lips with that sort of agonised transport which makes men under the lash set their teeth in whatsoever they encounter.
He had had that vanity of his qualities, the old grey rat, to hold by an independence even to the last capacity of the gutter for yielding him one. The stars, the cards (a greasy pack), the astrolabe and divining rod, had procured him thence, latterly, an obscene living. In taking it, he had had at least the justification of his own superstition.
If he sold immortal truths at a halfpenny apiece, it was only because necessity obliged him. They had all the value of genuineness in his eyes, and to “fake” antiques would only discredit him with the gods, upon whom was his ultimate reliance. What he had borrowed from Louis-Marie had been a loan to conviction—a last ounce of metal needed to insure his winged feet to the Perseus of his destiny. That he fully believed. Beyond it—it was a fact—he had not asked, nor accepted, a farthing from the young man.
But superstition, as a one-devil possession, prevails only through its plausibility Let its dupe once be disillusioned, and all the moral obliquities, out of which it had shaped its pretence, confess themselves the owners of the mansion. The maggots which devour a dead faith were bred in it living. Superstition, cast down, becomes the prey of what it had entertained. Dr Bonito, a Rosicrucian by conviction, had never perhaps been really dangerous until the stars came to prove themselves impostors. And then he delivered himself wholly to corruption.
In the meanwhile, bond-slave to his faith, foreseeing nothing so little as the imminent disruption of that faith’s particles, or articles, he cherished for the moment no particular thought of rascality towards anyone. He may even have felt a little cold thaw of emotion towards the human souls about him, as towards beings predestined to witness in him alone, conversant with the hieroglyphics of fate, that apotheosis which they all desired vainly for themselves. Smugly selfconscious of his frowsy coat and broken shoes, he likened himself to Elijah, on the banks of the Jordan, awaiting, an unconsidered prophet, the descent of the fiery chariot. His eyes travelled incessantly, feverishly, from his companion—poor Louis-Marie, the dull, apathetic soul—to the steps of the Town-hall, on which was displayed—under guard, but for all to see—the wheel of Fortune.
Suddenly a sound went over the vast throng, like a sweep of wind over a bed of rushes, bowing all heads in a single direction. It wailed, and passed, and died, and was succeeded by an intense hush. The wheel was seen to turn—and stop. Bonito clutched his voucher, holding it under his nose for identification.
The number, large and white, cynosure of a thousand eyes, went up on a black board—61.
A thin wheeze, such as strains itself from lungs winded by a blow, came from him. Then he gasped, and, twitching in all his features, nudged his companion, and set his finger on the card—61, sure enough. The sigh, the wail, rose again over the throng, and died down—11. Bonito, for all his faith, was shaking as if palsied as his finger travelled to the number. Even Louis-Marie, standing staring in his place, felt in his veins a sluggish thrill of excitement. Again the wheel turned, and again the card duplicated its record—81; and then once more it revolved and disgorged a single number—9, and the quatern was accomplished.
Bonito looked up. His forehead was wet; his lips were dribbling and smiling in one.
“Quantum fati parva tabella vehit,” he said crookedly. “And there are those who mock at astrology!”
A roar, instant, overwhelming, heart-shaking, broke upon his words. It greeted the appearance on the board of the fifth and final figure—a zero!
The gods had laughed. All stakes were cancelled, and forfeit to the Government.
Dr Bonito stood quite still. The sweat dried from his forehead. Slowly his face seemed to turn into grinning stone. The surge of the crowd roared round him, like fierce water about a pile. He heeded nothing of it. He only grinned and grinned, until his grin became a blasphemy, a horror. Then he recognised that he must stir, speak, do something human, to cheat the hell to which his looks were claiming him. He was conscious of a rigor enchaining his flesh; his feet seemed locked in the jaws of a quicksand; a little, and he would be under.
At the crisis, the card in his hand caught his attention. Very stiffly, moving his arms mechanically, he tore it into halves, folded, quartered, requartered, and, at a wrench, divided and sent those fluttering piecemeal. The act spoke an inhuman grip. It had hardly been possible to him a minute earlier. But its madness rent the veil.
He twisted awry, and glared up at his companion. Louis-Marie remembered that night in the café. He recognised well enough what had happened. The calamity might have stirred him little on his own
account, had it not been for this look in the ruined face turned to him. He shivered slightly.
“So much for the Taroc Mysteries!” whispered the doctor, “chaff of the gods! But I forgot that nought stood for the Fool.”
His tongue rustled on his palate like a dry scale.
“He hunts butterflies,” he said. “Why, you cursed owl, what are you staring at? Have you never seen him, with his net, on the cards? Nought is the Fool, I say, and I am nought—the butt of the gods. I’ll pay them!”
He took a frantic step or two, returned, seized his companion’s arm, and urged him from the press.
“Come,” he said hoarsely; “you lent me the means to it—I owe this to you—I’ll not let you go now.”
All his tolerance, it seemed, was turned to hatred. He regarded the young man as the instrument, however contemptible, of his undoing. The worse for the poor tool of Fortune! He would have to act whipping-boy to her ladyship. And serve the weak creature right for his flaccidity. He sneered horribly at him.
“Faith’s dead in me,” he snarled. “You’ll have to serve her turn.”
Quite stunned and helpless, Saint-Péray let him lead him whither he would. As they crossed into the Via Seminario, a royal carriage, making for the Palace, was brought to a stand against a gabbling stream of pedestrians, and stopped across their very path. They faced direct into a window of it; and there inside was Yolande.
Pale, agitated, her Dresden-shepherdess eyes glanced to and fro, and, all in an instant, caught that vision of other two, other four, fixed upon them.
We’ve heard of faces stricken into stone before some Gorgon apparition. Love’s severed head converts to softer stuff. His art is the plastic art, and answers to his dead hauntings in features stiffening into wax.
So seemed Yolande’s features in that moment. Her breath hung suspended on her lips, the colour in her cheeks. She had procured Love’s death, and thus was Love revenged upon her. Like a thing of wax she confronted the sweet cruelty of his eyes.
There sat a thin grey gentleman by her side, of a very refined and arrogant mien. The Chevalier de France had never encountered
Louis, nor Louis him. Suddenly the former projected his head from the window, and demanded in haughty tones the reason of the delay.
“Monsignore,” said a postillion, “it is the Lottery.”
The Chevalier sacre’d.
“Does that concern a minister of State, puppy? Drive through the rabble.”
The carriage jerked forward, and rolled on its way. Saint-Péray stood motionless, following it with his eyes. A touch on his arm aroused him. Acrid, vicious, fearfully expressive, the face of Dr Bonito peered up into his.
“Monsieur,” whispered the Rosicrucian: “there goes Madame Saint-Péray.”
Louis-Marie gave a mortal start, and put his hand to his forehead. “There is something weaving in my brain,” he muttered. “Look, look—shake it out! My God, it is an enormous spider!”
CHAPTER VII
T Prefect of Faissigny, commanded, for the second time within a week, and with a flattering grace of intimacy, into the King’s presence, discovered an exquisite butterfly where he had left a chrysalis. The royal head—erst as round and blue as a Turk’s—was adorned with a bob-wig in buckle, from whose toupee a couple of pearl pins stuck out like clubbed antennæ; the royal limbs and body were glossy with embroidered silks; on the royal coat of marooncoloured velvet sparkled a diamond star. Twin satellites of this sun, moreover, twinkled, like new-discovered planets, in the royal ears—a sincerest flattery, which his Majesty did not grudge to pay to so unique a pink of the elegances as M. Trix.
As he advanced to greet his visitor, he held a wisp of point d’Alençon a little raised between the finger and thumb of his right hand, while his left poised a gleaming snuff-box at a like angle. His manner was as charmingly playful as his “style” was unexceptionable. As a monarch he had no rival to challenge his preeminence in the Kingdom of puffs and patches.
“Welcome, my dear Prefect,” he said. “You come as irresistible as Apollo in Arcadia. I vow I am jealous of you, since seeing our adorable Daphne. Alas! that Fate hath imposed upon me the rôle of Father Ladon. But it is some compensation to have a god for suitor.”
“Your Majesty flatters and confounds me in one.”
Cartouche’s eyes were bright and nervous. He had not a full command of his lips.
The King smiled.
“Confounds you, Monsieur? How is that?”
“Daphne, Sire, if I am not mistaken, took refuge in a laurel tree, rather than suffer the god’s pursuit.”
“Bah!” The King shrugged his shoulders. “And she bewailed, I’ll swear, her foolish precipitancy for ever after. But the laurels in this case, Monsieur, are for your brow.”
“I do not feel like a conqueror, indeed.”
“Fie, fie, Monsieur! Is it necessary to remind M. Trix of his Cervantes? Faint hearts and fair ladies, forsooth. O, you have a character to maintain, I assure you! But certainly such beauty cuts the sinews of self-confidence. Well, it is no matter. You have only, as it happens, to receive the keys of the capitulated citadel.”
“I do not understand your Majesty, I declare.”
“Our Majesty, Monsieur, has already thrown the handkerchief for you, and one without a crown in its corner. That was a self-denying ordinance, for which we will not altogether insist on your gratitude. But, in plain language, sir, we desire this union, and have made no secret of our desire.”
“Sire!”
“Hush, Monsieur, or she may hear! You would not damn your reputation with a show of diffidence? Hush!”
Cartouche looked at him aghast.
“She is present? She—Sire, Sire!” He made a hurried step forward.
The King, smiling, motioned him aside, and tiptoed to a door. The two were quite private and alone. The royal closet was destined, for the moment, for Love’s confessional-box—ordered with a view to the stimulating of emotional disclosures and throbbing confidences. It was evening, and the tapers, shrouded in their silver sconces, diffused a soft motionless glow over a piled luxuriance of stuffs and cushions; over a carpet tufted thick as turf; over hangings of purple velvet. They woke slumberous gleams in furniture; flushed the drowsy faces of satyrs on polished bureaux; creamed the bare legs and breasts of nymphs; touched the cheeks of grapes, piled in a gold salver on a table, with little kisses of light; slipped into the warm depths of decantered wine, and hung tiny crimson jack-o’-lanterns there to lure the already half-drunken senses to red ruin. No drugging pastille ever vulgarised the air of that enchanted chamber; but a sweet and swooning perfume was contrived to steal all over it, as if a bed of lilies of the valley lay beneath the floor
And, in a moment, she was there, before Cartouche’s eyes—the loveliest, most lovable shape to be conceived in such a setting.
For an instant desperate and defiant, he feigned to himself to claim her appropriately to it—its sensuousness and artificiality. Her
lily complexion was toilet cream; her lips, too startlingly scarlet, were painted; the flowers in her cheeks were well assumed, since they owed to the rubbing of geranium petals. All these, with that gleaming gold for crown, that spun starlight of her hair, were but so many modistic arts, to which her simple dress of black supplied the clue. Out of that dusk sheath her shoulders budded with a double emphasis of whiteness—a cunning scheme of contrasts.
And so he lusted to slander her to his own heart; and would have cut that same heart out only to lay it at her slender feet and feel them trample it.
And she could be so stately, though a child. Giving the King her hand, she held him vassal to its whiteness, and smiled a gracious smile when he raised and kissed it reverently. She had become woman at her tender years—but through the hate and not the love of man. She had borne sorrow and was a virgin still. Passion fell dumb before that poignant motherhood: desire slunk ashamed before her eyes.
The King handed her forward, with a sort of conscious chassé. He was at pains to practise every punctilious elegance in his reception of this untutored girl. He looked even nervous and a little inferior. But custom gave him command.
“There are occasions, Madam,” he said, “on which even the King is de trop. I leave it to a lovelier monarch to reconcile the parties in this suit, sure that my affection for both, their sense of duty to the State, their own passions and interests, will move them to a compromise. Respect that Judge, my children, for whom I dethrone myself; and accept his ruling on a cause which I have very much at heart.”
With that, he released the Marchesa’s hand, and bowed profoundly, and withdrew. She made no gesture to retain him. The two remained standing as he had left them, silent and far apart.
A storm of emotions swept through the chambers of Cartouche’s brain. He shook in its thunder What was the power in this child, this white-and-pink wax doll, to humble mighty worldlings in her presence, bring them to her feet—not to sue, but to deprecate all suit of her as guilt—not to pray; only to adore, and own themselves unworthy?
She had beauty; and it was not a snare. She had virtue, and it was not a pose. ’Twas her inaccessibility made her covetable, O thou fond Ulysses!
But he did not desire her for himself, he thought. And yet, after all, why should he not? She was unattached; fair quarry to the freelance; no other man’s preserve. He had the right of chase with the whole world—no bond to honour, even, since she had let another cross the claim of his friend. He would never have suffered that for himself. She would never have dared that sin against Cartouche. He gloried suddenly in his name If he could only have met her first—a man worth a woman’s modelling, not a saint invertebrately blessed— a passion, not a sentiment! Was it too late even now? To gain the whole world in her and lose his soul! She could make an immortal lust of damnation—cancel eternity to a moment. He thirsted for that moment almost beyond endurance.
What was her power? He had accepted this interview, when thrust upon him, with a cynic mock for its pretence, a tolerant anticipation of the moral drubbing it was to procure him. He knew that, in her regard, not all his brilliant worldly gifts and qualities weighed as one grain in the balance of good things. A word from Louis’s lips, a look from Louis’s eyes, would have sent him and all his vanities kicking the beam. He could not get behind that essential righteousness. It was impervious to all cleverness, all intellect, all reason even. She was a fool; but a beautiful unattainable fool is as transporting a siderite as any other. Wisdom loved a fool—not for the first time in man’s history: he loved her, because her folly was inaccessible by him.
Some say that sex is accident—a chance development; that we are all bi-sexual within. Woman, prescriptively, is the one to covet most the unattainable, to pursue the most where most scorned, to love most the partner who most abuses her love. But what, if you please, does man? It all turns, in fact, upon the ineradicable human lust for adventure, the weariness of the rut, the reach at something out of reach. Yolande, as virtue, was forbidden fruit to this vice. Therefore he desired her, madly, fiercely; but, at the last, with a saving grace of humour.
He found himself, out of that, presently, and moved towards her, very formal and demure, though his heart was on fire. At a pace or two distant he stopped.
“Madam,” he said, “the King wishes you to marry me.”
He could see a shadow flutter in her white throat.
“I ask myself, Monsieur,” she said softly, “how I have offended the King?”
“Madam,” he rejoined quietly, “I told him that you would not marry me.”
“I ask myself,” she went on, seeming to ignore him, “what I have ever done to justify these shameless solicitations by the shameless.” Her frigid self-possession, as a quality of sixteen, was a quite pitiful abnormity. “You are by all accounts, Monsieur,” she said, “a student of the world. What is it in a woman that seems to mark her down your legitimate sport? Have I these unconscious attributes? Tell me, only in your own excuse.”
“I have said once before, Madam, that you are an angel.”
“Then do angels beck, like wantons, at the street corners? I am no angel, Monsieur, and your assurance proves you know it—claims me, through my own act, to be the butt of your scorn and mockery.”
“If you could see into my heart—”
“It professed to speak once of loyalty to a friend. Hold by your plausible surface, Monsieur. I would not stir those depths, if I were you.”
“Then, Madam, would you leave truth to perish in the mud. My heart is foul, maybe, but there is that to redeem it at the bottom.”
She stirred a little, turning on him.
“Truth, sir! Has it lain buried there since that time when for once it rose to foretell an outrage, which—O, Monsieur! I have not forgotten your words—your last, when you parted from me on—O, indeed, it is possible to accommodate a prophecy—to verify through a confederate a villainy which one has foreshadowed—my God! if that is Truth!”
He went as white as stone; he looked as petrified.
“What! Madam,” he said, in a quick, whispering voice; “do you pretend to deem me capable of that baseness?”
He gripped her hand suddenly, so as to make her wince; then flung it from him.
“I scorn you not for your act,” he cried, “but for your cowardice in striving to make me its scapegoat.”
He stepped back in great emotion; and she herself was agitated only a little less. Her young breast rose and fell in hard pantings: the force of her self-control revealed itself in this sudden struggle for breath: and in the end her passion mastered her. She turned a face of lovely fury on him.
“You, Monsieur! the scapegoat?—so wronged and misunderstood?—the poor innocent bearer of other people’s sins? Tell me, are you not that man who came and offered his services— O, God! the slander of that word!—to a soul most wounded in her faith, and therefore, as he thought, most susceptible to the sweet druggings of dishonour? Are you not that man who would have had me break my vows, stultify all that tragedy of renunciation, on the strength of a wicked sophistry? A noble friend to Honour—that man, who, baffled in his devil’s purpose, must revenge himself by instigating another to desecrate the shrine he could not force himself! A friend—”
He put out his hand, and touched her once more—quite gently this time. But there was some quality in the touch the very antithesis of that which had impelled his former violence. The girl faltered under it, and her speech shivered into silence.
“You are mistaken, Madam.” He measured out his words with a soft and painful accuracy. “If I proposed to commit you to what convention styles dishonour (forgive me for using the word once more) it was in order to save from worse defilement that very shrine at which I worshipped.”
She started, and flushed.
“Monsieur!”
“Nay, hear me out,” he said, in the same quiet tones. “Even the first of Tabernacles is not soiled in the poor sinner’s worship. My heart has always held your image, Madam, the loveliest of its possessions—and not the less because it cherishes a hopeless dream. I would have served that dream loyally for love’s sake: I would have given my life and soul to keep it pure. If I thought to
persuade it to fly to its natural sanctuary, there was a priority in vows to vindicate my daring. Have you ever considered, Madam, how you broke one oath to love to swear another to dishonour?”
She uttered a little cry—moved a step forward—clasped her hands to her bosom.
“Understand clearly, Madam,” he said: “I loved you, and would have yielded you to my friend. I had no alternative, indeed; but that is not to justify your slander of a renunciation, which was at least as holy, according to its lights, as yours. I did not urge your husband to that wickedness. If I hinted to you of its possibility, it was to open your eyes to the truth—to save my dream from a last contamination —to confide it to the shrine the most meet, and the most entitled, to hold it perfect for my adoration. There was no selfishness in that sacrifice. Though it closed the gates of Paradise upon me I was content, so long as the vile thing was shut out with me. I could have heard the singing of your loves within, without a bitter thought. But that you cannot understand. No virtue, in your narrow standard, can exist in worldliness. It must be all one or all the other—vice or sanctity.”
She was pale and trembling. She made a little involuntary gesture of her hands, half pleading half deprecating, towards him. He was cold as steel.
“As to this royal crochet of our union,” he said quietly—“it turns upon some fancied policy of State, to which I am no partner. I am as innocent of its instigation as of its methods or mistakes. It hinted, a moment ago, that you might be kind to me. I was as incredulous then, as I am convinced now that no tolerance towards sin is possible to your nature. I have worshipped at an exclusive altar, and my faith is construed into a sacrilege. You are insensible, Madam, to the exaltations of a great passion. I do not plead to you: I reject you. Even the weakness of my friend—for he is weak—raises him in my eyes above your cold, methodic virtue. I do not think you are worthy of him.”
She bowed her head, weeping. “I know it,” she whispered. And at that he was disarmed. He stood in great agitation a moment; then burst out suddenly:—
“Madam, Madam, if it is any consolation to you to know, such passion brings a self-redemption. I am not, cannot be the man I was —never again. Spare me that gentle association with yourself—your memory—I’ll persuade the King—Madam, it shall all come right—it —”
His voice broke; he hesitated a minute, struggling with his emotions, then hurriedly left the room.
And Yolande of the white hands hid her face in them, and for long remained shaken with sobs.
