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CLAIRE AND ROSA

1

Early in July 1948, Oscar reported for work with great hopes as a foreign service officer at the Parliamentary East Block headquarters of the Department of External Affairs. In Canada, he was Oscar Wolf, unclean, untouchable, outsider, Indian, forbidden by law by His Majesty’s Government from drinking a beer at the Royal Canadian Legion at Port Carling and at every other legion post across Canada despite having served his country with distinction in the front lines in the army. But Oscar Wolf, member of Canada’s Foreign Service, was someone who had gained entry entirely on his merits and was a respected insider among the architects of Canadian foreign policy when serving in Ottawa. And when posted abroad, he would be a distinguished diplomat representing all Canadians whatever the colour of their skin.

In the beginning, his expectations were fulfilled. He quickly adapted to the Department’s quasi-military, quasi-ecclesiastic culture, especially the way its members behaved as if they had been initiated into holy orders. The recruits who entered with him that summer of 1948 were mainly former servicemen who had fought in the war and they welcomed Oscar, as a fellow veteran, into their ranks. Several of the senior officers treated him with some reserve, but they were graduates of Oxbridge in the 1920s and 1930s and they looked down on anyone who had not studied in the Old Country.

In September 1948, Oscar’s staffing officer posted him to the Canadian mission to the United Nations in New York to assist Canada’s representative on the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Throughout the fall, he carried out research, wrote position papers, sent reports to Ottawa, lobbied other delegations, and to his great satisfaction was present on the historic day of December 10 when the General Assembly unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Spokesmen for the Canadian delegation told the press that acceptance by the international community of the declaration meant that victory over the evils of Nazism and Fascism was now being followed by triumph over injustice toward peoples and individuals. Soon the colonized peoples of the world would form countries of their own, which would take their places in the United Nations as members equal in status to the countries of the old imperial powers. But best of all, they claimed, the signatories to the declaration were bound to accord equal rights and freedoms to all their citizens, whatever their “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

Oscar rejoiced. The Native peoples of Canada, he believed, would soon have the same rights as white Canadians. No longer would they be wards of the Crown. No longer would they be under the control of the Indian agent. No longer would they be deprived of the vote. No longer would they be forbidden to hire lawyers to defend their interests in court. No longer would Indian women who married white men be expelled from their homes on reserves and be stripped of their identities as Treaty Indians. No longer would the police come and take away their children to residential schools. And he, Oscar Wolf, had played a part, however small as a foreign service officer, in bringing this new world into being.

But when Oscar returned to Canada in 1952 at the end of his posting, he found that nothing had been done to improve the lot of his people. The Indian agent still reigned supreme on the reserves and Native children were still being separated from their families and dragged off to residential schools. Elsewhere, the other countries that had signed the declaration in December 1948 with such great fanfare were likewise not doing anything to help their impoverished and marginalized peoples. In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan was still lynching blacks. In Latin America, white settlers were still stealing the land of the Indians. In Australia, the police were still tearing babies born to Aborigine mothers and white fathers from their families to be educated in special institutions away from their families. In South Africa, the ruling Afrikaner National Party was implementing its apartheid policy to keep blacks, coloureds, and Asians in a state of perpetual institutionalized servitude.

“Don’t be discouraged,” the undersecretary told Oscar when he went to see him. “Governments around the world, including Canada, are busy fighting the Cold War, and as soon as that’s over, they’ll get around to living up to their international human rights obligations. Just be patient.”

2

In the meantime, Claire, who had played such an important part in Oscar’s life back in the summer of 1935, was facing a crisis in her marital life. She had studied Art Appreciation and Home Economics at the University of Toronto and married Harold Winston White, a stockbroker from an old Toronto family, long-time friends of her parents. After the wedding, her husband’s opinions became her opinions, his friends became her friends, and his passions for golf, tennis, and bridge became her passions. They had two children, a boy and a girl who were boarders at the same schools their parents had attended. In addition to doing volunteer work with wounded veterans at Sunnybrook Hospital, Claire was active in the University of Toronto Alumni Association and contributed used clothing, worn-out suitcases, chipped cups and saucers, discarded electrical appliances, and second-hand romance novels to the annual spring charity bazaar sale in her church’s basement.

Claire and Harold had a home in Forest Hill close to the houses of their parents and a summer home on Millionaires’ Row where they held their own Sunday brunches with family and friends and spent endless hours playing bridge and tennis at the nearby Muskoka Yacht Club. Every spring, they attended the races at Woodbine and Churchill Downs with friends who were horse breeders. Every winter, they spent six weeks at their home in a gated community in Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean where they hosted dinner parties under the stars with many of the same people who had estates on Millionaires’ Row. They went marlin fishing from their yacht and were regular guests at Government House, where the British governor held parties for the British, American, and Canadian seasonal residents, as well for the members of the white expatriate community running the sugar plantations and nutmeg and mace farms. Occasionally, Claire and Harold passed people in the streets brandishing placards calling for freedom from British colonialism, but the governor assured them that independence would not happen in his lifetime.

Then, one day, Claire’s husband of fifteen years noticed the beginning of wrinkles around his wife’s eyes and upper lip and began to worry about his own mortality. Already forty-five, and wanting to be young again, he began having affairs with women twenty or twenty-five years younger than he was. Claire knew what he was doing but said nothing, not wishing to cause a scene, until one afternoon she returned home to find his clothes gone from his closet and a note on the dresser.

Dear Claire,

I have met someone else and I want you to give me a divorce. My lawyer will be in touch with yours.

Harold

Hoping Harold was just going through a temporary mid-life crisis and would soon be back, Claire did not give her consent. But Harold didn’t come back, and she reluctantly settled for a divorce in exchange for custody of the children, the boy now aged ten and the girl twelve, ownership of the house in Forest Hill, possession of the Mercedes sedan, shared occupancy of the houses on Millionaires’ Row and in Grenada, and fifty percent of his gross income.

It was then her turn to confront a mid-life crisis. The years had passed and she had little to show for them apart from a generous divorce settlement. Although she had custody of the children, they had their own circles of friends at their schools, rarely came home on the weekends, and when they did, always gave the impression they could hardly wait to leave. With the benefit of hindsight, it had probably not been a good idea to make them boarders when the school was only five hundred yards away. Certainly, when they were little, they hadn’t wanted to live apart from their parents and there had been tears. But she had been a boarder and the experience had been good for her, or so she had once thought. Now she wasn’t so certain.

Alone in a big house with no one to care for and nothing to do, she often thought of the idealism of her teenage years when she seemed to have more compassion in her soul. In those days, she had felt sorry for the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hungry people on the move in search of jobs or something to eat. She was strong in sciences in secondary school and had wanted to become a doctor and work for Dr. Albert Schweitzer who was running a hospital at Lambaréné on the Ogooué River in French colonial Africa. She had told her parents and they said they had no objection to her studying medicine. However, they didn’t want her to work with Negros, especially in Africa where they lived in mud huts and had leprosy sores on their bodies. In her parents’ opinion, Negros weren’t much better than the Indians everyone saw asking for handouts and drinking cheap wine in downtown Toronto.

Maybe that was why she had been so attracted to Oscar back then. As an Indian, he represented the people she wanted to help. He was also the only dark-skinned person she had ever spoken to. And as she came to know him, she discovered he wasn’t so different from the kids at her school. He laughed, he joked around, and he was easy to talk to. At the same time, he also wanted to help people and was planning to go to university to study to become a missionary to his people in the north. He even liked Chopin, her favourite composer, and seemed to have a crush on her.

Then she had this wild idea. She would invite Oscar to one of her family’s Sunday brunches and they would see for themselves that dark-skinned people were as charming as anyone else. They would see in him what she saw in him — a decent human being who planned to make something of his life. But it had turned out badly. Her parents were so shocked when they saw him they covered up their embarrassment by treating him badly. And Oscar reacted by spilling his orange juice on the living room floor. Her furious parents refused to listen when she tried to tell them about his good qualities and ordered her to break off all contact with him. They must have thought there was more to the relationship than there really was. Taking the easy way out, Claire had dropped her plans to study medicine altogether. She then met and fell in love with Harold, and before she knew it, the years had gone by and she had nobody.

During all this time, she had never forgotten Oscar. She had tried to maintain a relationship in the beginning. She had telephoned him after the frigid reception she and her mother had given him at the general store, but didn’t blame him for hanging up on her. The last time she had seen him was when they were both lining up to register for their first year courses at the University of Toronto, but he either hadn’t heard her call his name or he had deliberately ignored her when he was leaving the building.

Some years later, just before she got married, in fact, she asked about him at the general store in Port Carling and was referred to Reverend Huxley, who told her that he had gone to California. Each summer, Claire made a point of attending at least one service at the Presbyterian church to pick up the latest news about him afterward over a cup of coffee. Early on, Reverend Huxley told her with a note of pride that Oscar had written to say he had left his job picking cherries and had found work in the entertainment business. Although Oscar had not spelled out exactly what that entailed, Reverend Huxley assumed that since he was living in California, and since Hollywood was in California, Oscar was now an actor playing Indian parts in the movies. As the years went by, Reverend Huxley let her know when Oscar joined the army, when he won medals for bravery, when he started university, and when he joined the Department.

With some hesitation, because she didn’t know if Oscar was married or single or whether he was still upset with her for treating him so badly when they were teenagers, she looked up his name in the Ottawa telephone directory and called him. To her delight, he was glad to hear from her and they were soon seeing each other on a regular basis. Since Oscar only had a small one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa and a minuscule Foreign Service salary, she provided him airline tickets to fly to Toronto to spend the weekends with her at her place.

It did not take long for their intimate relationship, cut short in the summer of 1935, to resume. Her friends and family, however, were scandalized that she would take up with an Indian. She tried to include him in her social set but her friends stopped talking to her. Worried about what their friends might think, her children came up with excuses not to go home, and spent their weekends with their father and his new wife. The neighbours on Millionaires’ Row did not include them in their Sunday brunches and the president of the Muskoka Yacht Club, someone Claire had known since she was a little girl, dropped by and told her as gently as possible that the members had asked him to tell her that they were not welcome to join their bridge games. When she took Oscar shopping at the general store in Port Carling, the villagers turned their backs on them. His friends and relatives at the Indian Camp, however, greeted them warmly when he took her to see them. Clem’s welcome was just as enthusiastic when Oscar took her to meet him, and he kept Claire amused with his jokes and witticisms. She was puzzled, however, when Oscar’s mother would not emerge from her bedroom to say hello.

In the summer of 1955, Oscar’s staffing officer called him in and asked him if he would be interested in a posting to the embassy at Bogota, the capital of Colombia, three thousand miles away and nine thousand feet up on the windswept, rainy Alto Plano of the Andes.

“It would be a step up in your career,” he said. “You would be one of only three first secretaries at the embassy, and if you do well, there will be greater things in store for you the next time around.”

Oscar eagerly accepted the offer, but Claire was not happy when Oscar told her the news, especially since he hadn’t consulted her before making his decision. She liked her house in Forest Hill; she enjoyed spending time at the homes whose ownership she shared with her former husband; and she didn’t want to be so far away that she would hardly ever see her children, even if they were now avoiding her. And while she was glad she had connected with Oscar again, there were some things about him she didn’t like. For example, when she took him to the opera, he was always asleep and snoring by the middle of the first act, whatever was on the program. When she persuaded him to accompany her to the running of the Queen’s Plate at the Woodbine Race Track, he refused to wear a top hat and striped pants as required under the dress code, and she had been embarrassed when the race steward told Oscar he could not sit beside her in the VIP section. There were also times when he disturbed her sleep, crying out and laughing in the night, talking about his grandfather and someone named Lily.

Thus, while she was fond of Oscar, she certainly was not in love with him. And when he told her they should quickly get married to comply with the long-standing departmental edict that only married personnel could live together abroad, he mistook the look that came over her face as one of pure joy rather than one of utter panic as she contemplated spending the rest of her life supporting her husband in obscure diplomatic missions around the world and being treated as unpaid labour by the wives of ambassadors.

“You go ahead to Bogota and get things ready,” she told him, desperately putting off the moment when she would have to inform him their relationship was over. And six months later, after mailing him letters every week saying how much she missed him and promising to join him when she had put her affairs in order, she sent him the following telegram:

DEAR OSCAR. I am too much of a coward to tell you in person that I really do not want to get married. Not just to you but to anyone. I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have and so this is goodbye. CLAIRE.

3

In later years, Oscar would date the onset of his alcoholism, the start of his bizarre behaviour, and the collapse of his career to Claire’s message rejecting him for the second time. When the messenger who had delivered the telegram left his office, Oscar turned his seat around to face the window and stared out at the low black clouds hanging over the bilious green eucalyptus trees on the hills behind the chancery for the rest of the afternoon. From time to time, the telephone rang, but he ignored it. Occasionally, someone knocked on his door and called out his name, but he remained lost in thought.

He saw himself back in the house on the reserve as a child of two or three again, unable to control his bowels, and his mother picking him up and shaking him, calling him a filthy animal, shoving him naked out into the snow and slamming shut the door behind him. Then he was six or seven years old at the Indian Camp. It was summer and his mother was chasing him, wielding a stick in her fist like a club, screaming at him to stop and take his punishment like a man after he upset her for some forgettable reason. Scared, he ran into the water to escape, and as he swam through the weeds away from the shore, he became entangled in what he at first thought was a thick piece of rope, but was terrified to discover was actually a long, thick black water snake. It thrust its triangular head and darting tongue at his face as it slithered and squirmed around his body trying to escape and he gave a great involuntary scream that he immediately regretted, because boys, he knew, were not supposed to be afraid of snakes. His mother called him a sissy for months afterward, never tiring of embarrassing him by telling the story to anyone who would listen. The blow to his pride, he remembered, had hurt him more than the beating she administered when he eventually went home to receive his punishment.

As for Claire, her message stung, but he harboured no strong feelings against her, certainly nothing to compare to the depths of the bitterness he felt toward his mother. But why couldn’t she have just told him to his face that their relationship was over? He would have felt bad but would have soon recovered if she had made an effort to explain her reasons. This time he was older and less able to cope than when he was a resilient teenager back in 1935 and better able to shrug off the damage she had inflicted on his psyche.

That evening after work he went home, changed out of his suit, threw a poncho over his shoulders, went out into the dark, cold drizzle of Bogota’s perpetual winter and flagged down a cruising taxi.

“Llevarme a un bar,” he told the driver. The driver laughed and drove him to a place he knew in a poor but tough part of the city where no diplomat would dare venture. A woman in a tight sweater and short skirt smoking a cigarette at the entrance greeted him like an old friend and offered to drink with him inside.

“No, gracias,” he said. But on seeing the look of disappointment that crossed her dark-brown, acne-scarred face, he reached into his pocket and gave her a twenty peso note. The woman smiled at him through broken teeth and pushed open the door for him. If this generous customer had problems and wanted to be left alone, she would respect his wishes.

Oscar stepped inside and waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the bright lighting and low ceiling. The floor was wet and slippery from the water tracked in on the boots of customers, a duo was playing mournful Andean flute music, and there was a smell of damp ponchos, cheap perfume, and clogged toilet drains. With his dark skin, high cheek bones, and straight black hair, Oscar looked no different than the people who lived in the neighbourhood, and when he opened his mouth, he spoke with a local Spanish accent acquired from his live-in cook and maid. It was a perfect disguise. The waiter who led him to a table in the darkest corner of the room poured him, without asking, a shot of aguardiente, the cheap rot-gut anise-flavoured sugarcane liquor favoured by the vast majority of poor Colombians out for a night on the town.

“Quieres que deje esta contigo?” he asked, and when Oscar nodded his agreement he left the bottle on the table and departed.

Oscar raised his glass and tossed its contents down his throat, only to gag on the raw drink and spit half of it out onto the floor. He refilled his glass and drank from it again, this time slowly, letting the alcohol dull his senses. Throughout the evening he continued to drink, determined to drive Claire from his mind through an act of will, just as he had with the existential issues of belief and redemption that had plagued his life in the aftermath of the fire. But the more he drank, the more he thought of her and the more he realized he would never forget her. The initial impact of her message had worn off, but he missed her more than ever.

One of the reasons he had so eagerly accepted the offer of a posting to Bogota, he now saw, was because he had expected Claire to ease his entry into the class-conscious society of Colombia. Now he would have to do it by himself, and wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge. He had become dependent on her. He was shy, withdrawn, and found it hard to make friends. She was outgoing and mixed easily with people from all walks of life. She could discuss fashion trends, gourmet cooking, and travel destinations, subjects of little interest to him but which were of never-ending fascination for people in the diplomatic world he now inhabited. The Canadian staff at the embassy, while friendly enough, spent most of their spare time socializing with each other and playing tennis at the local country club while their children swam in a heated pool under the watchful eyes of a lifeguard.

An embassy colleague had once taken him to the club to meet the manager, helpfully explaining that the club rules denied membership to Negros and Indians unless they held diplomatic passports. While he was greeted and shown around courteously, he just couldn’t see himself spending his free time at a club that excluded people like him.

By the time he finished his second bottle of aguardiente, Oscar was finding it hard to remain awake and decided to go home. He put a fistful of money on the table, rose to his feet, and stood for a moment until his head cleared enough to let him make his way to the exit without stumbling against the tables and chairs. Outside and looking for a taxi, he felt someone take hold of his arm. It was the prostitute he had met when he first entered the bar.

“Cuidado, no estas solo,” she said, pointing at four men who had followed him outside, thinking he would be an easy mark despite his size. She hurried off as he turned and faced them. They pulled knives and surrounded him.

“Tu dinero, Indio, y rapido!” the one in charge told him, coming close with his knife in his hand.

Even with his senses impaired, Oscar was more than a match for his assailants. Reacting automatically, he drew on the hand-to-hand combat skills learned in the army to break the arm of his first attacker. He then turned on the others, kicking and beating them and driving them away. He calmed down on his way home in a taxi when he realized how close a call he had had. The police, had they been summoned to deal with the attempted robbery, would have submitted a report to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it would have called in his ambassador to ask what his first secretary had been doing brawling with criminals in such an unsavoury place. He might well have been fired; he decided to stay out of bars in the future.

The next day, he bought half a dozen cases of aguardiente and began drinking in the mornings as soon as he woke up, in his office when no one was looking, and at home when he was alone in the evenings. He told himself that he could stop whenever he wanted, but he soon could not get through the day without his ration of alcohol. Fortunately, through trial and error, he learned that if he kept his consumption to one bottle a day, he could keep his depression at bay, remain steady on his feet, and not slur his words. Thus, although he began to display major errors in judgement at work, everyone assumed that was because he was basically incompetent, and no one suspected that it was because he had a drinking problem.

One year into his posting, Pilar Lopez y Ordonez, the receptionist, rang Oscar in his office.

“There’s someone here at the front desk to see you.”

“Who is it? What does he want?”

“He wouldn’t give his name. He just said he had something important to say to the Indian. I guess that means you.”

Pilar was the twenty-two-year- old daughter of an old Colombian family whose ancestors had come with the first wave of Spanish colonists to New Granada in the sixteenth century to look for gold and to establish cattle ranches and coffee plantations. Despite the black roots of her straight, dyed blond hair, her piercing black eyes, and dark brown complexion, she would have been offended if anyone had insinuated that Indian blood ran in her veins. If asked, she would have said that she had nothing against los indios, as she and members of her class disdainfully called Indians, as long as they knew their place: and their place was working for pittances seven days a week and twelve months each year as maids and cooks for the people of her social station. Another place for them, one she and her friends never discussed but tacitly accepted, was that of serving as unwilling sexual partners for their younger brothers, breaking them in, so to speak, before they married respectable women and founded families of their own.

From the day of Oscar’s arrival at the embassy, Pilar hadn’t liked him because he was un indio, even if a Canadian one. She had naturally treated him with the same indifference and disdain she reserved for los indios in the family home, but wasn’t worried about being fired. She didn’t need her job, or any job for that matter; her family had plenty of money, and she had become a receptionist only to fill in time at a prestigious embassy until she met the right person and got married.

“He’s over there,” she said to Oscar when he went to the reception area, pointing at a sunburned, full-bearded man who was reading an out-of-date copy of the Globe and Mail. A few minutes later, in Oscar’s office, the visitor identified himself as Luigi Ponti, a doctoral student in anthropology from the University of Verona conducting research on the Cuiva Indians of the tropical rainforest on the Meta River, close to the border with Venezuela. Death squads, he said, hired by ranchers who wanted to drive away the Indians in order to graze cattle on their lands, had moved into the area, burning their villages and shooting them on sight. He had gone to the police but they refused to act. He had spoken to Colombian bureaucrats, called on politicians of all political parties and even approached the newspapers.

“But nobody wants to do anything about it; they all say they’re afraid of the big landowners and their hired thugs. But I think the real reason is the governing class quietly supports the death squads. Getting rid of the Indians would open up vast areas of the country and be good for national development. I’m now making the rounds of the embassies trying to get them to take an interest in what’s going on down there. So far, I’ve been to see the Americans, the French, the British, and the Dutch. They all told me that nobody back in their capitals is interested in the fate of a few primitive Indians in the jungles of Latin America. Their publics are all out of compassion. The horrors of the war burned them out.”

“And so you’ve come to me because someone told you I was an Indian?” Oscar asked, pouring shots of aguardiente for his guest and for himself.

“That’s right,” Luigi said, drinking to Oscar’s health. “I took a chance that you might be interested in the fate of your brothers down here.”

“I’d like to help, Oscar, honest to God I would,” said Georges Leroux, Canada’s ambassador to Colombia.

The ambassador had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico City, where his father was an expatriate businessman, and had attended a school for the children of rich foreigners and upper class Mexicans. On his way to and from school each day, he could not help but see the poorly dressed, underfed, suffering people, especially the Indians, who came into the city each day in search of work.

“You have lots of money,” he told his father, “why don’t give some of it to the poor?”

“I’d like to help, son,” his father had said, “honest to God I really would, but the problem is far too great for any one person to solve.”

Georges hoped his father was wrong, and after graduation from McGill University in the late 1930s, he joined the Department hoping to make the world a better place. However, his staffing officer posted him to the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires to spend the war as an assistant to the Canadian trade commissioner. With the resumption of peace in 1945, Georges asked to be sent to the Canadian mission to the United Nations to work on human rights issues, but he had demonstrated such a flair for trade promotion in Argentina that the Department denied his request and sent him as trade commissioner to the Canadian embassy in Havana, Cuba.

Canada’s ambassador in Havana, however, was a unilingual Anglophone who neither spoke nor had any interest in learning to speak Spanish. And since the great majority of Cubans did not know English, or if they did, preferred to speak their own language with their foreign contacts, the circle of contacts of the head of post was confined to the American and British ambassadors and members of the overseas Canadian community. Georges, who spoke Spanish like a native Cuban, thus became responsible for developing and maintaining links with members of Cuba’s government and power elite.

The Department quickly promoted him to the rank of deputy ambassador to reflect his new duties and moved him into a fully furnished three-bedroom, four-bathroom house with extensive gardens filled with fragrant yellow and white flowering frangipani plants and chirping crickets. A cook, maid, and gardener, who lived in staff quarters on the grounds discreetly out of sight of the main house, prepared his meals, washed and ironed his clothes, and cut the grass, tended the gardens, and brought him gin and tonic cocktails with snacks whenever he rang a little bell. He became accustomed to cha-cha-cha music and white-tie dinner parties in the hot and humid night air around swimming pools under giant royal palm trees. Profiteroles stuffed with vanilla ice cream and covered in hot chocolate sauce became his dessert of choice. Dom Perignon champagne, Chambertin burgundy, and Château d’Yquem sauterne, purchased at the local diplomatic duty-free shops, became his favourite wines. He relished the atmosphere of the casinos frequented by mobsters from Miami and corrupt government officials and their high-priced call girls. Each time a high roller won or lost millions at the throw of the dice, and whenever bombs placed by revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government exploded nearby, an addictive thrill of excitement, a sense that he was living life on the edge, ran through his body.

Georges decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his career in Latin American capitals like the Havana of the late 1940s and set aside his youthful enthusiasm for making the world a better place. And because he proved to be so good at promoting trade and making friends with the people who counted in Latin American society, the Department acceded to his desire, and in no time at all he rose to become an ambassador. His son, who attended local private schools in the countries of his service, and who was deeply concerned at the sight of so many beggars on the streets, sometimes asked his father why he never did anything to help the poor, but he never received a satisfactory answer.

“The Spaniards and then the Colombians have been slaughtering Indians in this country for centuries,” Ambassador Leroux said, continuing to lecture Oscar, “and they’ll keep on slaughtering them until the last one is dead. When they’re not killing Indians, they’re killing each other. In the last three years they’ve murdered a half-million of their own people in some of the most godawful ways. We don’t know what makes these people tick. They’re crazy. I think they like killing people. Outsiders shouldn’t get involved. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.”

“But we’re living in the twentieth century,” Oscar said. “Canadians helped draft the United Nations Charter and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Surely we should speak out when we see governments standing by and doing nothing when their Indians are being killed.”

“Oscar, I feel like I’m talking to my son. You were a soldier. You’ve seen the Nazi death camps, I presume. You know what man is capable of doing. And yet you’re more than a little naïve. We signed those human rights declarations just for show, just to make us feel better for treating your people, and all the others in Canada who have no power, the way we do, just to make us look good internationally. The Indians will remain at the bottom of the heap for my lifetime at least. I shouldn’t have to tell you all this.”

“What if I was to go with this anthropologist and see what’s going on for myself and send a report to Ottawa?”

“What do you think we would do even if you prove the allegations are true?” asked the ambassador, who always associated himself with the Canadian government in his pronouncements. “We would do nothing. And we wouldn’t do anything if we could. In embassies in these places in the middle of nowhere, we don’t care about Indians. What we care about down here is selling asbestos, mining equipment, diesel generators, automobiles, tractors, trucks, bagged flour, and shiploads of beans, anything at all to make a buck and keep Canadians working. When we can’t sell our goods fair and square, we do like our competitors and bribe the hell out of the corrupt bastards in charge to get the deals, even if they just pass on the increased costs to the poor. And when you get right down to it, there’s no real difference between bribing people and killing Indians except the amount of evil involved. We all agreed to get our hands dirty, whether we knew it or not, when we joined the government. We’re all Indian killers, Oscar, even you.”

Overcome by his admiration of his own eloquence, Georges took Oscar by the hand, squeezed it, and said, “But go for it, Oscar. Go find out what those bastards are really doing, and we’ll see what we can do to help!”

With his backpack stocked with bottles of aguardiente, Oscar travelled with Luigi by bus, communal taxi, DC-3 aircraft, and canoe to the place of refuge of the Cuiva Indians, hidden from the death squads in the jungle fringe along the wide, slow-moving Meta River.

In his alcohol-induced daze, Oscar felt as if he had entered the world of the ancestors as described to him by Old Mary during the evenings in her house around the kitchen table when he was a boy. In the mornings, he stripped naked and swam with the others in the deep, sheltered warm waters of a lagoon. In the evenings, he shared the meals of turtle eggs, catfish, crocodile, and monkey meat, prepared by the women over an open fire. Later on, before retiring to his hammock, he sat down on the riverbank and listened, as Luigi interpreted for him, to the murmur of the people discussing the events of the day and pointing up at the stars and repeating the legends passed down to them by their ancestors over the millennia.

One morning, as he ate his breakfast, he saw a young woman looking at him. She was over six feet tall, with wide hips, large breasts, smooth chocolate-brown skin, and thick, straight black hair that fell down to her waist. Never before had he seen a woman with such a beautiful smile. Never before had he been so attracted to someone at first sight. It never occurred to him that her natural beauty had been enhanced by the aguardiente he had just drunk. He smiled at her and she looked away. She looked at him, he smiled back at her and she looked away. It became a game. One night, she came unbidden and joined him in his hammock. And throughout their night of lovemaking, because he couldn’t pronounce her name, he called her his little Rosa.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Luigi told him when he saw them together. “What if your Rosa gets pregnant? You won’t be here to take care of her and no man will want her. I should have warned you. Never sleep with the Indians. It’s the golden rule of anthropology. And by the way, in the language of her people, her name is Morning Star.”

“But I’m Indian, too, Luigi,” Oscar said. “I’m exempt from that rule. As far as I’m concerned, she’ll always be my little Rosa.”

When the visitors left to return to Bogota, Rosa and Oscar both cried. Two months later, Luigi came to the embassy accompanied by Rosa and asked for Oscar.

“Your friend is back and he’s not alone,” Pilar informed him.

Oscar could scarcely contain his pleasure at seeing Rosa again, even though she spoke only Cuiva and could only communicate with him by sign language. He had thought of her often during their weeks of separation, remembering the heat of the night on the bank of the Meta River and their two bodies thrashing around in his hammock as the posts supporting the five hundred pounds of their combined weight creaked and groaned. He would sometimes see her in his dreams swimming naked in the river. At other times in his imagination he would picture her dressed in the latest designer gown, the most elegant woman in the room, swinging her hips and smiling that captivating smile of hers as she strutted with supreme effortless panache down the runway of a famous Parisian fashion house on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré as the crowd clapped their hands in appreciation. And although Rosa now looked at him as if he were a complete stranger, he was certain she had missed him as much as he had missed her.

“I told you you’d get into trouble when you slept with Rosa,” Luigi said, after Oscar escorted his guests back to his office. “Her family says she’s pregnant and is now your responsibility.”

Oscar immediately asked Luigi to tell her he wanted to marry her.

“You don’t have to do that,” Luigi said. “You can take her to a convent, make a donation, and after the baby is born, the nuns will find someone to take it. They’ll give Rosa Spanish lessons, teach her to cook simple meals, scrub floors, and wash clothes, and then they’ll get her a job as a maid or cook with a rich Bogota family. She won’t be as happy as she’d be if she was living with her family back on the river, but she’ll have a roof over her head and be fed.”

Oscar wouldn’t hear of it. No child of his would be put up for adoption. What if the adoptive parents didn’t love the baby? What if they were just looking for unpaid labour? What if they were to beat the child? What if they were like Pilar and were prejudiced against Indians? No child of his would grow up to be as unloved as he had been. And there was Rosa, his darling little Rosa. She would not spend the rest of her life as a poorly paid servant when she could be the wife of a distinguished Canadian diplomat. He loved her, or at least he thought he did. She would never lead him on and dump him as Claire had done. She was a pure and noble Indian, just like he was, and he wanted more than anything else to spend the rest of his life with her.

When they heard the news, Oscar’s Canadian colleagues told him he was making a big mistake, Pilar had trouble keeping from sneering, and Ambassador Leroux was offended.

“You’re out of your mind. You just can’t wander off into the jungle, pick out a mate, and bring her back to marry as if you were some sort of caveman. Civilized people don’t do things like that. Members of the Department don’t behave like that!”

Ambassador Leroux, Oscar thought, was just upset because he had neglected to investigate the reports of death squad activities despite his lengthy absence on official business in the Orinoco River Basin. Oscar was sure he would come around after he had thought about the matter for a few days. But Ambassador Leroux did not come around. He sent a telegram to the undersecretary to give him the news and to recommend that Oscar be returned to Canada and fired.

As the ambassador waited anxiously for an answer, the Bogota newspapers covered the story in all its salacious details. Columnists, tipped off by Pilar, who had learned that Rosa was pregnant, provided lurid accounts of how Oscar had left the capital for the Orinoco River Basin to save the Indians from extermination at the hands of death squads; how swimming among the piranhas, he had met and seduced a buxom Indian maiden; how he had returned to Bogota leaving his newfound love alone and forlorn in her thatched hut; how two months later she arrived pregnant at the door of the Canadian embassy with a ragged, long-haired student from the University of Verona; how the distinguished first secretary of the Canadian embassy to the Republic of Colombia intended to wed his sweetheart in holy matrimony; how Ambassador Leroux was beside himself with rage; and how the Canadian embassy was now the laughing stock of the entire diplomatic corps.

The telegram from the undersecretary, when it finally arrived, was not to Ambassador Leroux’s liking. The message, copied to the prime minister, the minister of Indian affairs, the minister of national defence, the minister of citizenship, and the RCMP Security Service, took some time to get to the point.

Acknowledge receipt of your message of 1 September. Am personally acquainted with Wolf and am sorry to hear of his troubles. Have consulted within Department with Latin American Division, Legal Division, United Nations Division, Communication Division, Information Division, Protocol Division and Defence Relations Division, and outside Department with Department of the Prime Minister, Department of Indian Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Justice, Department of Revenue, Department of the Solicitor General, Department of Federal-Provincial Relations and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to find solution. There is consensus matter is delicate and everyone stresses importance in exercising great prudence in handling bearing in mind Wolf is only Indian officer in Department and for that matter in entire Canadian civil service. For almost one hundred years, Canadian governments have been trying to prepare Indians to abandon their savage customs and to adopt civilized ways of white man. If all goes according to plan, it is expected that within decade or two, Indians will be given privilege of voting in elections as well as some legal rights presently reserved for white people. Thus would not want, repeat would not want, Wolf to leave Civil Service. He is war hero and example of what governments have been attempting for generations to accomplish with Indians. Worse, if fired because he wishes to marry Indian woman, even Colombian Indian woman, Indian people of Canada and churches would be irritated.

Please provide all necessary assistance to Wolf with his marriage plans, including making representations to Colombia to expedite paperwork and closing embassy day of wedding. Staff are to attend ceremony and to give wedding presents. Extend my personal best wishes to the happy couple and in due course facilitate return of Wolf and his bride to Canada.

The Undersecretary of State for External Affairs,

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Ambassador Leroux had to read the message three times to understand what the undersecretary was saying. It must be a practical joke from one of those idiots in the Department, he thought, and asked for the telegram to be sent again. Unfortunately for the ambassador, the instructions remained unchanged. To Oscar’s delight, the ambassador called at his apartment with a bouquet of flowers and some good news.

“I may have been a little hasty and said a few things in the heat of the moment I didn’t really mean when you announced your plans to marry Rosa. Now, after careful reflection and consultations with the Department, I have come to give you my personal blessing and — this is very important, Oscar — to provide my formal approval, in my capacity as Her Majesty’s Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary to the Republic of Colombia, for your marriage.”

Although Oscar in his moments of sobriety was not actually in that much of a rush to get married, and Rosa, not speaking any language known in Bogota, had no idea what was going on, the marriage was held within the month at the seminary of the Saints of the Holy Apostles, a Canadian order of priests in Bogota. The Colombian authorities were at first amused when the Canadian embassy applied by diplomatic note for a marriage licence. They thought the Canadians were not being serious and were making a joke at their expense; an unusual joke perhaps, but a joke nevertheless; these gringos sometimes had a strange sense of humour. But when they sent a note denying the request, the ambassador called on the foreign minister to make representations, and the undersecretary called in the Colombian ambassador in Ottawa and did the same thing.

“Just think of the symbolic value,” they told the Colombians. “Such a marriage would symbolize the union between the Indians of Canada and Colombia and provide a new foundation for relations between our two countries.”

And so, although Rosa had no birth certificate and no one, including herself, knew her age, the Colombian government directed the Ministry of the Interior to overlook the rules and issue a marriage licence to the betrothed and an exit permit to Rosa. Indians, after all, were just Indians and the Colombians really didn’t care what happened to her.

The entire Canadian embassy staff, including a smirking Pilar, attended the wedding. Although invited, most diplomatic representatives stayed away because the dean of the diplomatic corps, a former dictator who had enjoyed imprisoning and torturing his opponents when he was leader of his country, had let his colleagues know he thought such a marriage would undermine the high ethical standards diplomats occupied in the social structure of Latin American society. A dozen or more members of the foreign ministry accepted their invitations, but did not come. The Canadian priest who performed the service was puzzled when Rosa didn’t seem to understand when he asked her at the appropriate part of the ceremony if she took Oscar to be her lawful wedded husband. In the end, it all worked out and Oscar and Rosa flew to Ottawa with their wedding presents in time to celebrate Thanksgiving together as the leaves turned colour in the Gatineau Hills, and they began their new lives as man and wife.

4

The two years Oscar would spend in Ottawa before being posted abroad again would not be happy ones. While the senior officers were prepared to overlook his conduct in Colombia, the other ranks were not as forgiving. Their view was that Oscar had used his Indian identity for personal advantage, and not knowing that his odd behaviour had been triggered by the collapse of his relationship with Claire, they thought his passion for human rights had affected his judgement. When Oscar reported for duty, his staffing officer congratulated him coldly on his marriage and exiled him to Information Division in the basement of the East Block to draft letters for the signature of the minister to schoolchildren who wanted information on life overseas for their school projects but who were too lazy to do their own research.

His marriage, Oscar soon discovered, while not an absolute failure, did not live up to his hopes. For one thing, it turned out that Rosa was not pregnant.

“It’s just amoebas and parasites she’s picked up from drinking the water back where she comes from,” the doctor said after conducting a few tests. “That’s why her stomach is so swollen. In a few weeks or months, after taking a few pills, she should be back to normal.”