Arturo Cova, protagonist of The Vortex, is a player, skilled in the manly arts of deceitful seduction. And he is a poet, which no doubt makes him a better player but also, at least occasionally, makes him a sensitive man. Mostly, though, Arturo Cova is a fulsome fictional exemplar of a sort of masculinity (think Don Juan Tenorio, think Tale of Genji) focused on amorous conquest. Don’t expect to like him at the beginning, or perhaps, ever— although that is, of course, up to you. By the end, his trials and tribulations have clearly made him a better person. Moreover, Cova is a fictional mouthpiece who denounces very real abuses of human rights, always a likable trait in my book.
Still, I rather enjoyed knowing from the outset that he is to be devoured by the jungle. That ultimate outcome is among the most famous aspects of the novel, and with good reason. Announcing Cova’s doom is the chief job of the novel’s framing tale, the first thing we read. A representative of the Colombian government in a remote Amazonian region supposedly presents a manuscript left by Cova: this is the bulk of The Vortex. It contains sensational denunciations of conditions suffered by Colombian rubber tappers in Brazil and Peru, and it indicates that Cova has vanished forever in the rainforest.
Arturo Cova represents a well-defined Latin American social type, the young elite man of letters. His family has enough rural wealth to allow him a law degree and a life of bohemian leisure in the capital city, Bogota. He has become markedly an urban person. He is a serial seducer and “deflowerer” of girls who are often not his social equals, but who are led to believe, whether or not he explicitly promises it, that he will marry them. During his student years, this playing around may even be the chief focus of the young player’s life. Afterward, perhaps he will gain government employment requiring little actual labor, or perhaps invest in a profitable business venture that will contribute to the modernization of his country. Or perhaps not. In the meantime, he basks in the modest prestige of his slender volume of poetry. An interest in poetry does not distinguish Cova from many other students of his generation, however. Literary pretentions proliferated, a century ago, among young elite males with the wit for it. Mastery ofliterary language was a key aspect of their prestige.
In his seminal text, The Lettered City, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama described the process whereby elite males “inscribed” the Latin American countryside, writing it into national life and appropriating it for their own, urban purposes. The Vortex (1924) constitutes an outstanding example of that process, making it one of the most famous Latin American novels of the twentieth century. Often, as in The Vortex, Latin American writers of the early 1900s focused on regions remote from the relatively sophisticated capital cities. Across the hemisphere, their novels culminated a century-long process of literary nation building.1
The Vortex was the most prominent of these novels internationally. It was soon translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese, as well as English.2 It says something about the novel’s international stature that, when Biblioteca Ayacucho began to publish its notable collection of emblematic Latin American classics in the 1970s, The Vortex was its fourth title, of more than a hundred. No doubt, this was partly due to the editorial influence of Angel Rama, but the novel’s lurid depictions of the “jungle” certainly contributed to its wide appeal, too, as did its action-packed plot. In addition, the sensational human rights abuses detailed in The Vortex are highly relevant to understanding the early twentieth-century rubber boom in Amazonia as a whole. Mario Vargas Llosa’s recent novel
The Dream of the Celt deals with some of the same general events as The Vortex.3
Jose Eustasio Rivera, the author of The Vortex, was born in 1888 in the southern Andean region of Colombia, far from Amazonia. He became acquainted with the rainforest and the rubber boom when, in 1916, after finishing his law degree in Bogota, he joined a government commission tasked to clarify the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Rivera’s function on the expedition was legal secretary, and portions of The Vortex were apparently written at various campsites. Rivera’s brush with the rainforest was thus limited but real and reasonably extensive. The Vortex was published in Bogota in 1924, to immediate acclaim—so much acclaim, in fact, that Rivera was able to arrange an English translation quickly at a time when English translations of Latin American fiction were incalculably rare. He died suddenly in 1928 while on a visit to New York, where he was arranging for the English translation and discussing movie rights.
Much like his protagonist Arturo Cova, whose biography parallels his own in obvious ways, the novelist Rivera had published a well-received book of poetry in his youth, and he aspired to infuse his prose with a poetic language and sensibility. Early drafts even had occasional meter and rhyme that he had created inadvertently. Rivera loved rarefied vocabulary, which is what most later Colombian readers seem to remember about their reading of The Vortex in high school. I recall that, as a new reader of Spanish in the 1970s, I found the novel very heavy going. It sent me to the dictionary more times than any other reading in my first Latin American literature course. For me, Rivera’s poetic prose gave new meaning to the word “florid.” The 1935 English translation, to which I had desperate recourse at the time, communicated the meaning well enough but failed to preserve Rivera’s innovative style at all. For example, the 1935 translation forced the novel’s quick-flowing two- to three-page sections into a conventional chapter structure.
Here, I have endeavored to preserve more of the unconventional edginess of Rivera’s prose and the naturalness of his dialogue, while dialing back the floridness of his purple patches. As for the novel’s mood, attitude, action, description, and characterization, it has been re-created in full. Nothing else will do because, in this novel, every detail matters. Try to skim it, and you will lose the plot almost entirely. The exposition sneaks up on you. Whenever you find yourself wondering if something can really be happening, the answer is always yes.
The true main character of The Vortex, far more important than Arturo Cova, is the Amazonian “jungle” itself. What does that mean?
The “jungle,” one could say for starters, is the rainforest. But there’s a big difference. The “rainforest” is benign, brimming with the biodiversity upon which the future of our planet partly depends. Above all, the rainforest is threatened. The “jungle,” in contrast, is threatening, brimming with snakes and piranhas and poisons and diseases. Furthermore, the jungle seems actively malicious. Not only can it very easily kill you, it wants to. Rivera’s trees are poetically plotting to avenge humanity’s decimation of the world’s forests. Rivera’s human characters struggle against the malignant jungle, which “devours” them in the end.4 Rivera thus answers and adds to earlier Romantic visions of the natural world, and notably, his devouring jungle is feminine: la selva. Overall, Rivera’s “jungle” reflects an outmoded way of thinking about the natural world, as something to be conquered and subdued by “man.” It contrasts starkly with the modish celebration of all things “ecological” in Colombia today.
In the 1920s, the Amazonian rainforest was still home to many indigenous tribes that had maintained their own ways of life for centuries, entirely separate from the national societies of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The indigenous people figured among the most victimized workers during the Amazonian rubber boom, as Rivera makes clear. Unfortunately, though, his view of the “Indians” seems as dated today as is his view of the “jungle.” Rivera’s description of the rubber boom, overall, is quasi-ethnographic in detail, while his indigenous characters remain inscrutable Others. Rivera does recount various “superstitions” and practices, as well as one indigenous legend in detail. Given the limits of his training and experience, however, the authenticity of his ethnography is questionable.
Unquestionably believable and compelling, in comparison, is his description of visiting the rainforest itself. Get ready for water. Still today, visiting Amazonia means spending a lot of time in boats, large and small, including large riverboats, houseboats, tiny canoes, and all sorts of craft in between. The route from any place to any other place, for the characters of The Vortex, is discussed in terms of rivers, and if the characters are ever far from a riverbank, they are in danger. Until quite recently, deep, meandering, slow-moving rivers—large and small—were Amazonia’s only roads. This is because the South American continent has high edges and a flat, low center at the precipitation-drenched equator. As a result, water accumulates deep in the continent before finding its way to the sea through a few great river systems. The greatest of these is the Amazon River basin, which is large enough for seagoing ships to ascend a thousand miles upriver. Many of its tributary rivers are larger than the Mississippi. Even so, altogether they are not enough to accommodate the biggest seasonal rains. Then the Amazon and its tributaries spread out of their banks to cover vast, forested floodplains for several months of the year. During this time, the aquatic life swims around roots of the enormous trees that compose the forest canopy.
Among those great trees are several whose sap contains latex, natural rubber. To get at it, people cut incisions in the bark of the tree, so that the sap dripped into cups or buckets, rather as contemporary New Englanders tapped maple sap to make syrup. The latex sap was then congealed over a smoky fire to form solid balls, roughly the size of a basketball, and exported in that form. During the 1800s, natural rubber found many uses, such as waterproofing raincoats or boots. After the 1880s, rapid urbanization led to the paving of city streets, and all street vehicles began to need rubber tires. The advent of the automobile threw street paving and rubber consumption into high gear, and in Amazonia a rubber boom began. Amazonian rubber trees had never been successfully cultivated. Collecting rubber meant finding the trees that grew naturally scattered in the rainforest and tapping them there.
Large-scale exporters from outside the region controlled the rubber trade. They had the capital, the connections, the warehouses, and the large riverboats needed to bring provisions in and take rubber out. They held their rubber tappers as virtual slaves, through debt peonage, a practice sadly common in Latin American history. Through this practice, workers became indebted when labor recruiters (enganchadores, from a word meaning “to hook”) signed them up with a cash advance. Afterward, unable to grow their own food or acquire it anywhere else, the workers consumed overpriced company rations that consistently cost more than the workers earned. The workers were then bound to their employer by continuing debt, unable to leave until it was paid off, which meant more or less never.
The Vortex was written to denounce this system as well as other abuses that are vividly described in the novel. Although the particular instances are fictional, the general phenomenon was only too prevalent. Overall, readers can consider Rivera’s fictionalized picture to be a sort of century-old prose docudrama, accurate in outline and in some, but not all, particulars. The characters who drive the plot are purely fictional inventions who existed nowhere outside the novel, but the setting and major political or economic actors, such as Carlos Arana, the Peruvian rubber baron, and Carlos Funes, the Venezuelan regional boss, are based on real individuals, and sometimes, as in those two cases, they are even identified by their real names. The massacre at San Fernando de Atabapo really happened, the Casa Arana really hired a French scientist whom it then, apparently, murdered, and so on. The novel’s protagonist seems clearly based on Rivera himself, who had direct experience in Colombia’s remote southeastern regions.
Note that I say “regions,” in the plural. Besides the Amazonian rainforest, a second Colombian region—thus far unmentioned—figures centrally in the novel. This is the llanos, or Orinoco River plain, which drains to the sea through Venezuela rather than Brazil. This is Orinoquia, rather than Amazonia. Rivera made an extended visit to the llanos as a young man, and some of his most polished descriptive passages may have been written at that time. The llanos are a land of open vistas, not extensive forests, a land of llanero cowboys and cattle drives, although still a land of great rivers that spread out of their banks for months during the rainy season. Very unlike North American cowboys, however, dismounted llaneros feel quite at home in a canoe. Orinoquia is mostly in Venezuela, and the reader will notice that Colombian llaneros and Venezuelan llaneros mix easily with each other. Llanero lifeways and speech and music have much in common on both sides of the border.
That observation raises the last topic that requires consideration here, the meaning of nationality in the novel. Rivera meant to condemn, above all, the exploitation of Colombian nationals by nationals of other countries, although he also highlights the “collaboration” of bad Colombians. His nationalism is clear enough. However, once his characters enter the rainforest, the reader will often not have a clear idea of whether they are in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, or Brazil at a given moment. National boundaries had little meaning in this sparsely populated, densely forested land. The indigenous people of the rainforest considered themselves “nationals” of their own tribes. They responded little, or not at all, to invocations of Colombian, Venezuelan, Peruvian, or Brazilian nationalism. No government had a strong administrative, judicial, or military presence in Amazonia or Orinoquia. Those attributes of nationality were manifested in a very few towns—such as Iquitos (Peru) and Manaus (Brazil)—dotting a vast area of rainforest. The economic boom attracted people into Amazonia from all sides, producing a motley mix of nationalities in the rubber camps.
Race mixture was common, as well, and it is even more difficult to “see” in the text than is nationality. Several characters are called mulato, and one, catire (a similar, but lighter, mix). However, the reader would do well to imagine that a minority of characters in this novel (mostly outsiders to Orinoquia or Amazonia) are purely of European descent. A slight degree of race mixture in these regions passes without comment, even by urban outsiders.
In sum, beyond its famous poetic descriptions and its indubitable storytelling verve, The Vortex offers a sweeping and accurate view of dramatic events in the Colombian backlands (and beyond), circa 1900-1920. First you’ll see the faux official memo from the author Rivera, reading the mysterious, found manuscript into the official record. Then the protagonist Cova begins his story. He has fled Bogota with a young woman he has succeeded in seducing, and the direction that they have taken is toward Casanare, a fabled territory in the wild and woolly llanos.
Buen viaje!
Notes
i. Outstanding contributions to this hemispheric body of literature include Dona Barbara by Romulo Gallegos (1929, Venezuela) and Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Guiraldes (1926, Argentina). Brazil’s major writers Graciliano Ramos, Jose Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado, and Euclides da Cunha also contributed. Elsewhere in Latin America, post-1910 novels of the Mexican Revolution likewise explored on-the-ground realities, usually regionally. In Peru and Ecuador, indigenista novels, focusing on the lives of indigenous people, were part of the same search for national authenticity and inclusiveness. A complete listing would go on for pages.
2. English translation by E. K. James, 1935.
3. El sueno del celta (2010).
4. A similarly overpowering and enveloping “jungle” appears in the short stories of Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (1917).
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To the Minister of Foreign Relations:
In accordance with your instructions, please find enclosed herewith my transcription of a manuscript (forwarded to the Ministry of Foreign Relations by the Consul of Colombia in Manaus) by the recently disappeared poet Arturo Cova.
I have left the writer’s style intact, even including an occasional grammatical infelicity, limiting my editorial interventions to an explanation of the regional vocabulary that occasionally appears.
If I may be permitted to express my own opinion in the matter, I believe that this book should not be published without independent confirmation of its denunciations concerning the conditions suffered by Colombian rubber tappers in the Amazonian territories of neighboring republics.
Should you decide in favor of immediate publication, however, please remit any additional information at your disposal to me immediately so that it may be appended to this manuscript by way of epilogue.
Your obedient servant,
Jose Eustasio Rivera
Those who expected brilliant things of me, who forgot me as soon as my misfortunes began, who remembered me afterward only to puzzle at my failure—let them know that it was my destiny to be swept away, across the llanos to the jungle beyond, to wander like the wind, and die away leaving nothing of substance, only noise and desolation, behind.
—Excerpt from a letter written by Arturo Cova