Lost Worlds (15 page)

“Indians. Fishermen.” Francisco pointed to the far bank after we’d floated a couple of miles. I saw them. A huddle of brown figures on a small shaded beach gutting a pile of enormous fish—a few peacock bass (
pavon
), long gray catfish, a fang-toothed aymara, and some bright red beauties I couldn’t name.

“Where’d they catch fish like that?”

“In the main river. With nets.”

“Makes our catch look a bit pathetic.”

Francisco laughed. “Ah—you haven’t tasted ours yet. Much better.”

We eased over to the group, who watched us briefly and then continued their gory task, throwing the innards into a cracked wooden calabash. Two twenty-foot-long canoes were pulled up on the sand, each carved from a solid tree trunk.

A man dressed in a pair of ragged jeans walked out into the shallows to greet Francisco. He carried one of the larger fish and gave it to him. They obviously knew one another and a rumble of conversation began as if they were continuing a previous discussion. Apparently that’s exactly what it was.

“He’s trying to sell me one of his canoes.” He pointed to the larger one, a fine dark brown specimen, smooth on the outside and patterned with ax marks inside. “We talk about this every time we meet.”

“How much is he asking?”

“Fifteen hundred bolivars—about thirty dollars.”

“That’s all!”

Francisco shrugged and smiled. “Every time it gets a little less. One day I’ll buy it.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes, I know.”

The conversation ended with smiles. No deal today, but they both knew that the transaction would take place. One day. Soon.

We left the Indians still cleaning their fish and drifted off again downstream. Half an hour later we were back at the launching place and pulled the boat out of the water and high up the bank.

“Dinner soon. Your first piranha dinner.”

In the evening, after that memorable piranha dinner (Francisco was right—not much flesh but good eating), I spent some time with Hugo Estrada, the don of La Trinidad. We sat together in the easy chairs by a large mural painted on the outer wall of the lodge. It depicted the now increasingly familiar themes and sights of the region—the vast green horizons, the cowboys on their wiry little horses, the capybaras, the birds, the deadly jaguar.

Hugo gestured at the painting. “You know all this now, eh?”

“I’m learning,” I said. “But I’m still curious about you. Francisco has told me about your career as an agricultural adviser to the government, your honorary doctorates, your policies to limit imports and help Venezuela develop its own industries. I’ve seen that hallway in your ranch with all your awards and citations. Photographs of you shaking hands with presidents—”

Hugo smiled (twinkling eyes again) as he interrupted me.

“Ah—but did you see the room at the end?”

“Yes, I did. The one with that huge poster of the New York skyline.”

“Well—that picture is very important to me. You must understand that it is very easy here to get used to everything and you don’t want to leave. You become a king—here is all your domain. And it’s good weather, good things to see every day, beautiful birds and animals—so why leave? you think. Why leave? But that is not good. Not good for me. You need to remember other places. Big, big places. Then you don’t become a king. You understand?”

I nodded.

“Kings can be dangerous.” He chuckled. “I know. I’ve worked with many men—ministers, presidents, very rich men. When they start to think like kings…very dangerous. For them, for everyone. And so—I remember other places. Like New York!”

He paused to refill our drinks and we sipped them quietly for a while under yet another night sky pinpricked with a billion stars.

“The Indians also do the same for me.”

“You mean the Indians around today—the ones I saw on the river with Francisco?”

“No, no,” he said with a laugh. “We have problems with them from time to time. Especially the Cuivas who live over in Colombia. They fool around here at times. We go after them, but they just run back to Colombia. The Yaruro are good people, though. Good fishermen and good workers. But—no—I am talking about the ancient tribes—the ones who were here maybe ten thousand years ago. Between the Orichuna and Arauca rivers we have found many signs of their culture—thousands and thousands of pieces of pottery with beautiful designs and different colors. It’s not our clay—from some other place. And stones. We find lots of stones—and we don’t have any stones here at all. We think they were here for a very long time. We need to have proper studies of their culture.”

“No one’s doing any research?”

“No—not seriously. But I have much to tell them when they do. Tomorrow I will show you one of their burial urns—five feet high, a beautiful round shape, and made without a wheel.” We stopped talking for a while and looked at the star-filled sky.

“It’s good to be here,” I said.

Hugo chuckled. “Others ask me why I spend so much time on the
hato
. And I tell them—just look around you.”

He spread his arms wide and laughed.

The next day I was with Francisco again. He took me first to the old family ranch house full of portraits, shelves of books, and sideboards filled with crystal glasses and old family dinnerware. Outside, shaded by coconut palms, he maintained a series of breeding areas for some of the endangered species of the Llanos—anteaters, land tortoises, and alligators.

“Most of the alligators have been killed by poachers,” he told me. “We have to try and do something to fight back.”

After his U.S. education, Francisco had decided to reject lucrative offers of employment in the States and return to his father’s
hato
to continue the work of improving the ranch—trying to maintain, as he put it, “a benevolent control of balance.”

After long miles of rough riding on his Jeep across the endless plains, we arrived at the dairy, where a small herd of tamed cows were being milked by a ranch hand.

“Time for breakfast,” he said. Once again we had left very early at dawn, and it was only eight-thirty.

He led me into one of the cool, adobe-walled rooms of the dairy and pointed to two white wheels of cheese bathed in the limpid morning sun.

“Pick one,” he told me.

I selected the smallest, an eight-pound beauty with a curdy aroma, and we sat at a table outside drinking small cups of strong black coffee and eating slices of succulent cheese on slabs of
arepa
cornbread baked for us by his sister Carmen the night before.

“Do you ever age the cheese?”

“Not usually—we eat it too fast! But sometimes we wrap a special cheese in a skin of coffee beans and cloth and bury it underground for a year or so. It’s really hard when it comes out, but the flesh is much whiter than this—and so good!”

An hour later we were strolling on a broad beach of fine white sand by the slow-moving Arauca. Francisco pointed out small black nuggets of a hard rocklike substance embedded in the sand.

“
Azabache
. Petrified resin from the trees. You’ll always find it here. The
llaneros
carve it into tiny figurines and animals. You can buy them in the fancy stores in Caracas. It’s quite valuable!”

More rough and dusty driving in the Jeep across the ranch trails brought us to a large circular cattle pond. It was hot now. The sun had given up its early morning coquettishness and now pounded down like a hammer on our heads. The water was just too tempting. Not bothering to undress, I just jumped in, sneakers, jeans, and shirt, and bathed in the wonderful cold wetness of the pool.

Within minutes the sun had burned off all the moisture and I was dry and dusty again as Francisco led me to one of the ranch’s most unusual sights—a magnificent Italian statue of Christ carved from white Carrara stone standing high on a plinth, its arms outstretched toward the infinities of the Llanos. An inscription below the statue read in Spanish,
LORD, BLESS OUR PLAINS
.

“We call him Cristo de la Mata—this is the center of the
hato
and my family decided that we needed something special here in this wild place to remind us of the important things.”

Around the Christ figure were four smaller carved angels representing the races of the Llanos—Indian, black, white, and mestizo.

“Your family has a great love for this place,” I said.

“Of course,” he replied. “It has been our life for five generations.”

He handed me a folded piece of paper from his pocket with a poem written on it.

“My father composed this.”

I reproduce the verses in full because they seem to capture the spirit of the Estrada family’s work and caring for this wild land:

Much later on in the day, as we bounced back toward the lodge along more rough tracks, Francisco announced, “And now for Doña Barbara.”

“I was wondering when I’d see her grave.”

“Well, you seem so curious about her, I’ve been saving it for last.”

Not far from the old ranch we followed a winding footpath through the scrub to her memorial set behind an iron railing and shaded by an old divi-divi tree. It was a special moment for me; after all the reading I’d done and all the tales I’d heard, I was finally in a place Doña Barbara herself had loved and spent her tempestuous life protecting.

Nearby was the replica of her simple adobe and thatch home. In its cool shady rooms you could feel her presence. A hammock tied between two wooden veranda posts seemed to be waiting for her.

“How do you feel about all the tales of witchcraft and sorcery—all those Gallegos stories?”

Francisco smiled. “Oh, I don’t take them too seriously. She was a tough woman—a real fighter. She possibly created most of the myths herself to scare people. If people believe you can cast spells, they cooperate—they respect you. I think that was all it was. Maybe.”

“But you’re not totally sure?”

“Well—there are one or two things that happened…it makes you wonder. But how will we ever know? The important thing was that she survived. She faced the challenges and won. She was a woman for her times. A real woman.”

The hammock beckoned. Behind the house a flight of egrets flashed in the sun. In the flowers by the veranda hummingbirds sucked nectar and a jaribu stork, erect as a palace guard, watched us from a nearby lagoon. In the heat of the day the hammock offered languid leisure for Doña Barbara and all the people of the Llanos. A place to pause and remember Hugo Estrada’s phrase—“Just look around you.”

I spent many more happy days on the ranch discovering its secret places, and the memories still return: the swift dawns with breezes smelling of wild mint and cattle, as a million birds begin their morning clamor; flights of red ibis like long ruby rosaries; the white cranes high in the silver-gold light, serene and silent; corrals holding unbroken horses crying for the freedom of the plain; sand devils thrown up from the sun-dried land by sudden flurries of wind and sent swirling across the wilderness like writhing apparitions; the dainty paraguaton flowers that sweeten the air of the musty
matas
; the sense of being slightly drunk with the sunlight, the sweeping wind, and the open plain stretching away in every direction. And then those nights with the prairie, asleep, black, and silent below vast traceries of stars….

I remember my last night after a long and delicious dinner. The sun had finally set, but twilight still glimmered across the western plain; a girdle of dark clouds was cut by the sharp circular horizon of the savanna and, beyond that invisible stretch of silent land, a full moon rose, silhouetting scattered
matas
with their scrawny palm tops. The silence of the night eased across the flatness. A silence that, for centuries, huddled groups of
llaneros
have broken with songs, laughter, and tales of prairie hobgoblins, “nights of white shadows,” mysterious horsemen, and “the weeping woman” who leads men to drown in river pools and quicksands. But their laughter would pause at any mention of the Familiars. These were the most feared of all prairie apparitions. They often brought omens of disease and death, loss of wealth and property, terrible adversities, and were the ghostly outcomes of one of the strangest customs of the Llanos.

In line with ancient superstitions, whenever a new ranch was established a live animal would be buried beneath the first corral to be erected so that his spirit—the Familiar—imprisoned in the earth of the property, might protect and defend its owners in perpetuity.