[I am reading this 1989 novella in two halves. So far I have read the first half and written about it. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
Chapters 1-5
The old man is Antonio José Bolívar Proaño—this author loves to give names in full—and he lives alone in a poor settlement in Amazonia. He’s in his late sixties, and we discover he had been one of the first settlers in an impossible scheme to bring civilised life to the interior. Most of the book consists of flashbacks, really a series of chronological narrative catch-ups describing his earlier life, so that sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the present-day story that frames them. When a dead body is found in a drifting canoe, the old man can deduce that he was killed by a female ocelot, maddened by the shooting of her litter by this irresponsible outsider. The incompetent mayor had wanted to blame the men of the local tribe who had found the canoe, but the old man reads the obvious clues. He had been killed by a single slashing blow from a strong, four-clawed animal, and five small pelts had been found hidden in the canoe.
The old man knows straight away that despite his age, he will be expected to join in the hunt for her. He understands the jungle, and during these first chapters we discover how he came to learn more about it than any other white man, possibly ever. The opening chapter, set in the present day, demonstrates how the almost clownish incompetence of the white authorities have imposed almost intolerable living conditions in the interior, both for settlers and the indigenous peoples being displaced. A dentist who comes on the twice-yearly supply boat pulls teeth, offering only a roaring contempt for their ignorance in place of anaesthetic. Once, in an anecdote that’s typical of this book, the old man reminds him how he once removed the fifteen remaining teeth from a man who only wanted to do it for a bet. Antonio José Bolívar—why not use the old man’s name, as Sepúlveda almost always does?—is only wearing his false teeth because he’s talking. If he isn’t doing that or eating, he carries them in a handkerchief. It makes as much sense as his love of heart-wrenching stories of love, which he discovers almost by accident. Now, the dentist, whom he is happy to call his friend, brings him two per six-monthly trip. He reads so slowly and painstakingly two are more than enough.
The book is full of this kind of makeshift, slightly idiotic logic. But the man who more or less personifies it is the mayor. It’s a pointless post occupied by a pointless man, whose USP is the obesity that makes him sweat incessantly. His nickname in this translation is Slimy Toad, but I suspect Slimeball would be better. He’s selfish, venal, and patronises anyone with sound opinions that he’s too stupid to appreciate. Like the dentist, in fact like almost all the whites except the downtrodden settlers, he’s painted in broad strokes. The ‘gringos,’ either the hapless gold prospectors and hunters, or the occasional tourists, are clownishly inept, another of Sepúlveda’s jabs at the ruination inflicted by the intrusion of white men. The dead man had been one of these, pushing the finely-tuned ecology of the place off-balance and creating an almost insoluble problem. Which, no doubt, will be for the old man to resolve.
But not yet, because there’s a lot of back-story to get through. And some more front-story. The back-story is the old man’s. He was married young to the pretty woman he had known since the age of thirteen in their Ecuadorian village in the middle of nowhere. They had left when he had become tired of the succession of unhelpful tips about how he might eventually father children. They joined a scheme to populate the banks of Amazonian rivers with settlers, and discovered that the land was useless. After the first rainy season or two, with nothing but illness and death to show for their efforts, the survivors are offered help by people from the local Shuar tribe. They learn how to live in a degree of harmony with the jungle rather than fighting it—but the help has come too late for the still young Antonio José. His wife dies of malaria-induced fever, and she leaves him with nothing but their wedding photograph and his undying fondness for the memory of this woman and her comically long string of names.
He starts to talk to the Shuar, and discovers a great fellow-feeling with them.
[Back-story of his assimilation into the Shuar culture, Chapter 3, to be added.]
And we’re back to the present day, with AJ grinding through a few sentences of one of the new books the dentist has brought him—did I mention that he brings two on every trip, as researched by his favourite prostitute? Of course it’s preposterous, but that’s how things are in the supersaturated wackiness of this kind of book. And the terrain is supersaturated too, because the rainy season has just started. Then, just as the old man is out finding his dinner—the crayfish in the river are as available to him as fruit on a tree—someone shouts, ‘A canoe!’ But who would be drifting down in this weather? Another corpse, of course, slashed by the raging ocelot and with his face half eaten away by carrion birds. He had clearly been behaving as gold prospectors do, stumbling into trouble for all kinds of lowlife reasons in the lean days of the rainy season. Our man pieces together what happened, and comes to an important realisation. The ocelot is definitely on their side of the river, and it isn’t far enough away for rigor mortis to have set into the victim’s body. And it’s bound to keep on attacking…. Oh dear.
We can read it for you wholesale 