Castro's Country

I HAVE often heard my best friend in Carácas say that Venezuela was a country of contrasts. My own experience in that fascinating dictatorship was not of great duration. I did not even belong to that class of tourists for scientific purposes which Dr. Paul, in his recent communication to our government, maintains has been treated with such consideration. We went, in fact, in search of a summer’s recreation. Our friends called it mere midsummer madness to visit the tropics at that season. But we entered the republic at so interesting a climax of its troublous affairs, and we were fortunate onlookers upon so much that even the scientific tourist must usually miss, that, ever since, the Caraquenians and Castro have seemed personal and intimate. We left with the impression, not since altered, that Venezuela’s proper epithet is the land of extremes.

La Guayra and the Army of the Restoration

Even if one neglects the way-station island of Curaçao, a tropical Holland which exhausts one’s adjectives, the extremes begin before foot is set on Venezuelan soil. The northern shore of South America is a vast rampart flung off from the Andes, and walling Carácas from the foreigner with bills and battleships by six thousand feet of mountain barrier. Charles Kingsley, in Westward Ho, did justice to its magnificence, but he wrote from pictures of the inner eye. The advertising folders of the Red D line describe it, too, if I remember rightly, but in language no warmer than is used to paint the ordinary “Switzerland of America.” Consequently, when, in the dark before dawn, I stepped on deck to the swing of an off-shore ground swell, and saw a black and impenetrable cloud-mass looming high above us in the southern heavens, mountains so vast as to reach half-way to the zenith seemed the last of probable explanations.

Dawn comes quickly at 8°. A faint gray stole through the east. Suddenly lines of fire, dim, then brighter, began to trace out buttresses, peaks, the curves of gigantic slopes, cliffs that shone rosily far above in the dawn, and lost themselves in the clouds. The eye traveled upward through mountain vapors, and saw above them clear starlight, and vast, ominous, impending, a great peak, still based in the clouds, still in the night, while, moment by moment, the underworld was dressing itself in all the colors of a tropic day. I hurried to my stateroom to pull Giovanni from his berth. When we returned a minute later, the ship was swinging in a sapphire sea at the foot of what seemed the wall of the world.

La Guayra clung in squalid ranks to the scratched red of the first slope of the Andes, and the old gray peak of La Silla, a mile and a half above, streamed the tiniest wisp of cloud, a white pennant in a spotless heaven.

Of La Guayra, at the foot of the mountain wall, one hesitates to write. The name appears so frequently in the newspapers that much may be expected of its describer. And yet, ordinarily, there is very little to describe. The tourists who stop off there for a day or so on their palatial winter cruises must bear away a disappointing impression of South America. They can bear away little more (always excepting the Andes) than the long unkempt mole with tramp steamers and smuggling schooners under its wing, narrow, cobbled streets, full of a population that one remembers as white-clad, duskyfaced, and sour in expression, streets made picturesque by the burros who pace softly beneath their enormous loads, each following his brother’s tail, and the foremost led by a pensive Indian youth with shy eyes and furtive tread. That, I think, is all they could carry from La Guayra, except the smells, which are best left where they are.

But this August day when we entered the harbor was, by the merest chance, the day after the arrival of Castro’s army from the Orinoco, where, under the illustrious Gomez, they had some weeks before totally defeated the revolutionary, Matos, in a bloody engagement, in which some fifteen hundred lives had been lost and Castro’s dictatorship in Venezuela made secure. Our first intimation of the excitement came before we had reached the aforesaid cobbled streets. As we sat on deck a drum struck up on shore in the savage rhythm they use in the Venezuelan army, a loud beat, then a whirring rattle. On the beach we saw an almost endless line in single file winding along the waterfront and up, through the blazing, intolerable heat, for La Guayra is a furnace, up the corkscrew road to Carácas over the mountains. Every hundredth man, or thereabouts, in the thin, white line carried a yellow banner, and the sun flashed in diamond points from their guns. It was the Army of the Restoration, as the newspapers called it for the next weeks. A cruder sight was seldom to be seen. No northerner, no white man, could have marched over those mountains in the intolerable white, wet heat of noon, and lived. The officers (who, however, seemed all to be black) rode up with us that afternoon in a first-class compartment!

We sauntered up the shady side of a noisy street, with a toothless, jet-black Trinidad negro for guide, until we turned into a delicious open square shaded with heavy trees garnished with orchids, and there found the rest of the army. Up to that instant, and although we knew how serious had been the struggle on the Orinoco, we had spoken of the revolution in the jesting tone familiar to American comic papers. But never again! As I remember, there were some hundreds of men and many women stretched out in this little park. All the men were ill, most were wounded. Fine bronzed peons, with horrible, festering holes in legs or arms, unbandaged, often, I fear, untreated; skeletons, yellower than nature and shaking with fever; every form of sickness, wound, and misery was in that mock hospital. A veteran, perhaps, would have looked pityingly and passed on, but to us, softlings of a long peace, it was the first realization of war. I shall not forget one gigantic half-breed Indian, his head on the breast of a young and really beautiful Indian girl, his useless leg writhing on the grass; and still less a poor devil stretched on the hot, hard pavement (for the misery was not all in the park), covered with a poncho, and breathing his last of fever.

An hour later, and three miles away, we stopped by a full military band playing briskly on the sidewalk of the little resort of Maciuto, and, looking through iron pickets, saw a breakfast party beneath a tree which shaded the table with an umbrella of blossoming vines. Castro, the little general, was there, sipping champagne and toying with pâtés, so they told us at the gate. The contrast was painful!

Cipriano Castro

It was in Maciuto that we first met Castro face to face. The village is a little winter resort near La Guayra, embowered in impossibly luxuriant foliage and tucked upon a beach under the mountains. It was gay once, but was hard hit by the revolution. Our Carácas friend, the general’s daughter, told us that bullets kept zipping across the plaza at their last wintering there and made the stay over-exciting. But the Venezuelans take such accompaniments of war very lightly. It was this same señorita who, returning with her brother from the opera to her home upon the outskirts of Carácas, almost trod upon three armed men hiding beside a path. “Hush! Can’t you see that we are an ambush!” whispered one of them. Probably it is Castro’s partiality for La Victoria, where one can dance la danza all night, take one’s shoes off, and enjoy liberties forbidden by the formalities of the seacoast, that has most injured Maciuto. But on that morning Castro was there. He came over to the baths where we were drying off in the shade after a plunge inside the coral reefs. A dozen notabilities trailed after him, but so little did I suspect the yellow little man, in his gray frock-coat, of greatness, that it was only his preoccupation with the white skin of Giovanni that checked a request for a match.

He was one of the yellowest men I have ever seen, a color due to a tincturing of negro, or of Indian blood, or both. He reminds you of certain Balkan nobles, whose carefully correct dress only half conceals the barbarian. For Castro is immaculate, and, at the same time, if you can trust the eye, savage. It is this combination of traits which explains much of his diplomacy. We never met him, although his inspection that day at the baths of the two musios who had come to his country in August was long enough to constitute an introduction. Our friends were all godos, that is conservatives, and in Carácas the godos, who are the older, and the more cultivated, families, do not know the “government” socially. Unfortunately their relationship politically and financially often has to be a close one. So we never met Castro, and our friends refused even to take us to Miraflores — that beautiful villa built of loot, stolen from one looter by another, and now the dictator’s residence in Carácas —dor fear of social complications. But we saw him many times, and heard whispered anecdotes so many and so racy that a special article would hardly contain them. One view of the general was when, beneath festoons of colored paper and canvas legends in pompous Spanish announcing Hail to the Restorer, he drove through very lukewarm crowds into his capital, beside him Gomez, the real fighter of the last war, black — well, dark brown, but a perfect Nubian warrior in spite of his frock-coat. An hour later (this was upon the day the army arrived in Carácas), we drifted in the wake of a crowd into the sala of a great house, and found ourselves in the presence of Gomez, a very much bored Gomez, standing straight as a royal palm while a local poet read to him an interminable ode! Castro, perhaps, they were hailing otherwhere.

Once again we saw both chiefs in a notable fashion, but the vice-president must fade from our narrative as he has from the administration, although I suspect that he will be heard from if the Dutch really mean business at Curaçao, and probably not on Castro’s side. This last time was at a remarkable social gathering. It was called a “picnic,” and the engraved card of my invitation so announces it. Really it was what we should call a garden party. The host was the Bank of Venezuela, the financial backbone of Venezuela, which somehow has outlived revolutions and kept the country on a gold standard; an institution run by the godos, and indicative of what some Venezuelans could do if they had a real government, say a despotism, with a man who would not loot at the head.

The occasion politically was most important. Castro had conquered Matos, a godo, and a very rich one. Castro was on top, and was probably going to stay there. The godos, as nearly as we could judge the situation, had wisely decided to make the best of it, and hence the picnic, in which society with a good grace congratulated Castro on beating one of their own members. The papers, and indeed the people, talked about little else for weeks. But for an outsider its social aspects were more interesting than its political. Cultivated people, after all, are much alike the world over; and at the balls, teas, and dinners to which our Venezuelan hosts had taken us in these gay weeks, the Caraquenians we had met were like charming folk everywhere, although with delightful idiosyncrasies. But at the picnic “the government” was also present. I have already hinted that in Venezuela, or at least in Carácas, a tendency, which has been evident in our own country, has gone so far that there are two distinct social castes above the mob, — “society,” and those who enter politics. Now, much of Castro’s “government” had but recently arrived from the state of Los Andes, his birthplace, which is about as far in point of time from civilized Carácas as Pittsburg from New York before the railroads. Also the government was whitish, yellowish, brownish, and, often, undeniably black!

The picnic was held in a paradise. I do not trust myself to write of the most beautiful places in Venezuela. They encourage a riot of adjectives. This was a hacienda some miles from Carácas, in a valley of sugar-cane and coffee plantations, between lofty mountain ridges which led up to the great pyramid of La Silla. Gray and violet mountains, intense white clouds which are ever marching with the trade winds across their summits, emerald sugar-cane, dark green forests covering the coffee bushes, and in their midst a gray, four-square hacienda, with broad loggia on three sides, where they were dancing; to the right, a garden full of palms and strange, gorgeous flowers; to the left, a dense mango grove, beneath whose shade we breakfasted at little tables, on bouillon, pâtés, and sweet, warm champagne. All Carácas, the foreign ministers, and our two unplaceable selves had accepted and come. Principally we danced in the loggia, first to the excellent national band, then to a string orchestra full of guitaritas, whose peculiar runs send thrills through your leg muscles. I have never traveled in Spain, where, I suppose, is the home of the dance, but I have never seen such devotion to dancing as in these descendants of Spaniards. This was noon, at 8° from the equator, in August, and, though up three thousand feet, it was just a bit hot. Yet they danced, young and old, waltzes, quadrilles, and the native dance, the jeropa, as if the devil were in their toes.

The ladies of the government were the most gorgeous of tropical butterflies. They wore all the colors at the same time and jewels in profusion, but you seldom looked further than the paint and powder. I had seen a darky girl in Porto Rico powdered until she looked like a rusk, but she was at rest! These gaudy Spanish, Spanish-Indian, Spanish-Negro creatures were pinked, and scarleted, and whited on face, throat, and neck, until the original color appeared only on the upper arms; anti after they had danced for an hour one thought of the delta of the Mississippi in the old green geography! And so we all danced, painted and unpainted alike, and only the unbelievably florescent description in the next morning’s paper can give an adequate conception of what the Caraquenians thought of it.

In the shade of the house the foreign ministers and older Venezuelans talked, possibly politics, but probably not. On the loggia the politics of Venezuela was performing. I know no other word. They were dancing the waltz, which in Venezuela has a peculiar time all its own and most engaging, when I first caught sight of General Cipriano Castro ricocheting from couple to couple, his collar wilted, his gray frock-coat damp, and a wild light in his eyes. Caraquenians looked horrified and tried to keep out of his way, but could not. The spirit of the dance was unchained in him. As we watched, he dropped his partner, waved to the musicians, who stopped and then began on a quaint air. Castro ran down the length of the loggia, separating rudely the dancers into two lines. He ran back, and, with a coat-tail in each hand, began jigging ridiculously to the music, swaying right and left like an automatic toy. The dance, some one whispered, was la danza, a rustic entertainment forgotten in Carácas. Some of those in the lines knew it well, and responded to Castro’s swings and waggings by equivalent scrapes and jigs. But most did not, and confusion followed. The little man fairly screamed with wrath. His face grew yellower and yellower. He seized women by their bare arms, jerked them, whirled them, left the imprint of his lingers on their arms, and fear on their faces. It was fear.

I was exploding with laughter, for this absolute lack of self-control was as funny as it was significant. “For God’s sake, don’t let him see you laugh! He’ll put you in Maracaibo!” said an English voice in my ear. Perhaps he would have. I had just met Señor —, who was still limping from a year in the shackles of that underground prison. But he would as likely as not have gotten Giovanni by mistake, for, although we are in no sense alike, the Caraquenians could go no further than Usted, you, and el oltro, the other, in distinguishing us!

Whenever I read a pronuneiamento of Castro’s, or hear of the progress of his diplomacy, I think of three things: his uncontrolled rage and unspeakable rudeness in that danza ; the ridiculous bombast of the Venezuelan papers in describing his achievements on that and on more bloody days; and the story of a peon in his army who was found dead after the battle on the Orinoco, with fifteen hundred empty shells in his pit. A dangerous man, Castro. A boaster, who has no self control, and who will fight. Of his principles, it is unnecessary to speak.

We saw no more of Castro personally, but heard much. I wish that I felt competent to draw out the significance, for the present situation, of the opinions which many qualified to know gave us at that time. But only a student of the country can do more than gossip about the politics of Venezuela. I knew, and know, enough to agree with a recent writer in The Outlook that they begin and end with Castro. Some anecdotes of him remain from those conversations, and seem to have unusual bearing on his conduct then and since. The story, perhaps, is already familiar, of his first appearance in Carácas, as a representative from the state of Los Andes: how he took his seat in the capitol, pulled on a pair of white gloves, pulled off his shoes, and put them on the desk before him. Less familiar, but certainly true, is it that after he had made himself president by force of arms, he and some fifty or sixty Andinos, women of dubious character many of them, occupied the Yellow House, the official presidential residence, and sat down all fifty or sixty of them to breakfast every noon. When his followers were in need of money, “Little Chief,” they would come to him saying, “give me five pesos.”

Mme. Castro, who seems more civilized, came later, and cleaned out the brood, offering a revolver, so they say, to her husband, which he might use on her, or mend his ways. He mended them, but it seems they were like the Venezuelan roads, one mending suffices for a generation. They were building a pavilion in the suburbs “for the general’s pleasures” that summer! It was last winter, I think, that Mme. Castro had gotten an automobile, probably for consolation, and had rendered undrivable the El Paraiso road, which is the only possible motoring stretch in Venezuela, and almost the only drive. I wonder if she has quelled the pride of the famous “American Mule,” who stood a hand higher than the biggest of the native horses, and used to pull the little street car up the grade to the Plaza Bolivar. From recent reports it appears that she must have given up the subduing of Castro.

That was a Venezuelan picnic; delightful, for the Venezuelans have the instinct for hospitality; useful, for the godos and Castro have, outwardly, pulled together since; and peculiar. We met there some of the finest gentlemen, of native stock, that it has ever been my fortune to encounter. And on the way home we passed three officers of the Army of the Restoration, beating with sticks and swords a horse whose blood was already streaming down its flanks! Extremes again! And Castro, barbarian, sensualist, tyrant, who for so many years has kept himself in the saddle and by skillful diplomacy checked or checkmated every nation that has played the game with Venezuela, combines in himself the greatest extremes of all.

Outside of Carácas

The interior of Venezuela is so vast, so unknown, so full of possibilities, that an epic sweep would be required of its describer. My own knowledge consists merely of impressions of the infinitesimal portion of the whole which is easily accessible from the capital, impressions such as could be gained from a few horseback trips, a remarkable view, and a hundred miles or so on the railroad.

The view was from the top of that coast range of the Andes which walls Carácas from the sea. We climbed there (against the protest of our friends) one early morning, following the Spanish paved road, which went back to the days when “the Spanish main" meant something; or, where time and shiftlessness had destroyed every vestige, and this was most of the way, taking to paths cut by the sharp hoofs of burros deep into the red soil. The crest of the main range, above which La Silla still towered, was itself some six thousand feet above the sea at its base! It was grassy, cool with the trade winds, and odorous with violets, which go swinging down in bunches on great staffs over the shoulders of the natives, to be sold in the Carácas flower market.

At the very top there is an ancient ruined fort, and there we came, all unprepared, upon one of the great prospects of the world. For to the north we looked down, down, almost straight down for the whole of the six thousand feet, upon the infinitely blue floor of the Caribbean Sea spread inimitably to the horizon, the clouds above it mere white puffs below us, the ships black specks beneath them. And when our eyes were dazzled with the beauty of the great turquoise plain curving into its horizons, to the south range upon range of mountains rose one above another, until two blue peaks, so we fancied, looked down upon the endless llanos and the Orinoco.

But this was fancy only, for the mysterious llanos, whence everything curious and strange — beast-skin and birdfeather — in the Carácas markets came, by all maps must have been far beyond our eyesight, and of them I know nothing at first hand. These brown mountain ranges, which make up northern Venezuela, seemed to contain, however, between the pairs of them, narrow valleys. Later on we toured those of Carácas and Valencia on the so-called German railway, which, by eighty-six tunnels and one hundred and twenty-eight trestles, crosses from one valley to the other, connecting at Valencia with an English road running at right angles down to the sea and Puerto Cabello, a seaport some hundred miles west of La Guayra.

Extremes, again, characterized this rural Venezuela. First, we followed a valley, green and rich beyond description ; then crossed a desolate pass which wound among barren mountains; then another valley, where the train ran beside great shady forests of bucare trees, with the light green coffee bushes rustling like a green tide beneath them and graceful arms of bananas rising at regular intervals above the surface. Next, we passed the same scene, but gone to tropical wilderness, the coffee overgrown with a thousand shrubs, the bananas broken down beneath vine lariats — and this, so they told us, was the plantation of one of Castro’s exiles! Valencia, from the railroad, seemed a pleasant, wellbuilt town as we ran through it; but in its midst was a fine stone bridge, whose central arches, shattered by the revolutionists, were to be crossed only upon slender planks! And to the south a short train ride brings you to the beginning of the country where there are no railroads and only partial maps.

At Valencia we left the German corridor car for an English compartment, and entered upon a perfect extravaganza of scenic extremes. The road had to make its way through the coast range and down to the sea. This was accomplished by a rack-and-pinion descent down a long incline, and then a steep grade through a narrow gorge which led to the coast. Down this precipitous ravine we ran, between walls clothed in a magnificent tropical forest; above us vast trees looped with ropes of vines, tufted with parasites, and gay with brilliant birds; beneath us a brawling stream of hot water, pouring from some volcanic cleft higher up in the mountains. Then, in one curve, we left the ravine, the forest, the boiling stream, skirted a bit of dazzling beach with blue sea beyond, and entered the most pestiferous mangrove swamp the mind of man can imagine. The tide was low, and on the mud, which steamed in the heat, beneath the crooked and filthy limbs of the mangroves, thousands of crabs scuttled over the slime.

It was a fitting introduction to Puerto Cabello, a muddy, unhealthy town reeking with damp heat. A town with a hotel in front of which egrets and roseate spoonbills roost in an impossible traveler’s palm, which looks like the fan of a giant, while the back rooms are built to open upon a bit of enclosed coral reef with the surf breaking over it! A town with stagnant water in many of its streets, and huts squalid beyond description! A town whose populace seems to be mainly without occupation, and almost without clothes, while in the harbor enormously expensive dredging machines, bought for the graft, lie rotting and unused. A town succintly described by the American consul whom we found stretched in a steamer-chair, a graphophone on one side, a negro boy with a fan on the other. “This place,” said he, “is—!!!!!!! If you eat fruit, you get dysentery. If you don’t, you get

yellow fever. What in — is a man to do? ” Armed with two sets of pajamas, two tooth-brushes, a letter of introduction, and a bottle of claret, we had many adventures by night in Puerto Cabello, which, unfortunately, are inconsequential to this narrative, but we formed much the same opinion of the town. In summer, at least, Puerto Cabello is the quintessence of one Venezuelan extreme.

Social Carácas

The society of Carácas is at the same time provincial and cosmopolitan, a combination which any one will grant should be charming. The various powers have accredited diplomats of the first order to Carácas, not so much on account of the importance of Venezuela, as because their services are so frequently needed in the disputes for which the country has become famous. These ministers and their families give to Caraquenian society an air of the great world, and a variety out of keeping with the insignificant size of the city itself. It is a small society in a small city, and an aristocratic one. The native portion carries on a successful social war with Castro’s government, which controls it politically and often financially. Its wealth is considerable, although the vicissitudes of recent years have ruined many of its members. Even the notorious Matos, who belonged to this caste, though defeated, and in exile in Curaçio, was living, when we delivered to his family a letter smuggled from Venezuela, in one of the most considerable houses of “the upper side,” as they call that half of Willemstad which lies across the harbor. The aristocracy of this society is emphasized by the Carácas mob, the fearfully numerous lowest class, unwashed, idle, almost unclothed, living on cheap fruits or beans, and mingling the blood of three races in a product which is a foil to the few gentry who live among them.

The “good families” of Carácas live in houses which would baffle Morgiana herself to separate from those of the bad families. That greatest of levelers, the earthquake, which seldom leaves Carácas long unshaken, sets one story as a standard for all. Thus a long succession of low, stuccoed fronts faces the street, each front relieved solely by a great door, and one or two windows, enclosed in a basket of iron work, from which the señoritas see the world. There is an old Carécas song which says, ‘If you wish to catch a husband you must fish for him from the window.” And riding past the windows is a chief amusement with young Carácas bloods. This is how you do it. At about five you mount your mule (don’t start — no horse was ever better bred) and amble in the single foot del pais through the proper streets, seeing to it that your silver-mounted lariat jingles against the silver trappings of your bridle. The charm of the affair is that the iron bars act as chaperones, and nowhere but at the windows and in the dance itself can the Caraquenian señorita speak alone with a man. But though faces differ, the windows, in general appearance, do not, and difficulties of location are materially aided by the Carácas custom of naming the corners instead of the streets, so that Señor —, for instance, is said to live between The Parrot and The Cocoa Palm, or, as in one actual instance, the — family between Heaven and Hell.

If one finds one’s house and enters the great door, there is a very different story. Most Carácas houses are planned like those of Pompeii, consisting of a series of large, high-ceilinged rooms opening upon a patio which rises in a mass of palms, fern trees, and flowers to the height of the red-tiled roofs surrounding. Often a thin netting is cast over the whole patio, and a dozen or so brilliantly colored birds fly and sing in the palm branches, while white egrets stalk over the pavement below. Our house was one of the few in Carácas with an alta, a second story, which, in this case, was like a ship’s bridge looking down on the patio. There were our bedrooms, and our porch with its bookcases into which everything printed must go at night lest the cockroaches, inches across, should eat them; and there we sat in the morning, sipping delectable coffee, and watching the endless sweep of the white clouds across the peaks of the gray mountains above us. It was warm enough to do this in pajamas, and cool enough, except at noonday, for tennis or such exercise. One can ask little vainly, except energy, from the climate of Carácas.

The patio is the place for balls and teas, and there one dances on stone or brick, while beneath the loggia the long table is spread with cakes of all kinds, perhaps “choke cats ” (I am not sure of the Spanish), which explode into powder when you bite. At the street front is the drawingroom, or sala, where the family assemble when they are “at home.” In the older houses this room is heavily hung with old-fashioned pictures, the windows are thickly curtained in the style of the 70’s, and on the carpeted floor several furniture families are assembled, each in its allotted place: a marble-topped table and a circle of plush chairs here, a walnut table and its circle of walnut chairs there. In such a sala we sat on the plush family while Señorita —, in black with a red rose in her hair, sang to the guitarita. —

“I asked of St. Antonio three things, my salvation, money, and a good husband.” Answers St. Antonio, “Caramba! How can he be a good one if he has to be a man!”

On one evening of the week it is comme il faut to go to the Plaza Bolivar, an excellent public square, shaded by mahogany trees, and sit near the fine equestrian bronze of Bolivar to hear the military band, the only public institution in Venezuela, except Castro, which seems to be thriving. The girls, carefully chaperoned, sit in a long row, the men of the party stand behind their chairs, and before them sometimes walk the dandies of Carácas, but more often stand and stare point-blank at the ladies, with a rudeness which is as remarkable as the absolute unconcern with which it is endured. Later your friends will probably take you to La India, an old café and a good one, where they have the finest chocolate in the world. Indeed, one never knows the possibilities of chocolate until one has stopped in Venezuela; and the coffee is almost as remarkable. But one Venezuelan drink is not so agreeable to a modest northern palate, and that is the raw rum which, at eleven or twelve on a hot morning, is the proper drink at the Carácas café.

I wish that I could retail some of the stories of Venezuelan life heard in La India, — of the prominent official (perhaps still alive) who loaded his loot in coin on a launch which he filled to the gunwales, and drove her across the open sea to a refuge in Curaçao; of the melancholy succession of American ministers who disgraced us in Carácas in the days when the spoils system was at its worst: X, who drank from finger-bowls and kept his neighborhood moist with tobacco juice; Y, who suffered from the delirium tremens; Z, whose wife, at dinner-parties, used her napkin for a handkerchief. But Carácas gossip requires a book for itself.

The major part of this gossip consists of highly colored episodes in which Caraquenians have suffered in life, limb, or property from the government; and it is impossible to conceive of this charming Carácas society unless the dark as well as the light is kept in mind. It was the society of a town in Latin Europe that we met there, — courteous, pleasure-loving, fond of saint’s-day’s festas, fine clothes, dancing, gossiping, and gallantry; yet set upon a crater in which the lava of mixed bloods, poverty, greed, and crime flaunting the rhetoric of patriotism, is always overflowing.

Neither liberty, property, nor life is secure in Venezuela. And there is a good deal that is pathetic about these Caraquenians, living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, living comfortably in the few good years, exiled or imprisoned in the lean ones, or, if fortune favors, spending in Paris what they have saved, yet with an unshakable love for la patria, a name as often on their lips as in their absurd newspapers. Two extremes, the sombre endurance of the Spaniard, the mercurial spirits of the other Latins, seem to meet in them. Robbed, abused, imprisoned, they are exiled, but seldom emigrate. In New York they have their especial hotel, and in Curaçao their own café. The fortunes of their country always seem to be their own. “Carácas has been very sad,” said an old Venezuelan to me on the way to Porto Rico, with a peculiarly personal interest in the welfare of the capital. And “Carácas has been sad, but now it is very gay,” were almost the first English words I heard when I arrived there. If it were not for Castro and the ominous degeneration of the Carácas mob, it might be a patria to be proud of as well as to love. But until the little chief falls before a rifle bullet, or departs for Paris to spend his enormous gains, the good Caraquenian will be safest anywhere but at home.