Saludos

This was the season of rains that thundered down from the Andes.

“Senora,” said Sandoval, bowing in the doorway of the hut, “buenos dias. How have you dawned?”

I hadn’t dawned too well. In fact, it seemed to me that I’d been dawning all night. An unidentified number of mosquitoes in my camp cot had kept me as active as they had been for several hours. But since it is my iron-bound policy never to talk of unpleasant things before breakfast, I refrained from any mention of the insect life in my Paotoshiari home. A charming little home it was, too—a thatched hut on stilts with one tiny room and a large, open verandah.

Besides, in the face of such exquisite Spanish manners, no one but a boor could do anything but return the courtly greeting which implies that you and the sun have risen rosily to shed light and sweetness over the land. So I got out of my cot and smoothed out the slacks in which I had slept (the river was muddy, and I couldn’t get the laundry done very well), put on my Peruvian silver hoop earrings, and was ready for whatever the day might bring.

As I walked the fifty yards or so to the bathroom for my pre-breakfast ablutions (the bath was a very pretty jungle stream which I shared with various wild life, including, sometimes, a shy little green snake), I reflected upon the matter of Spanish courtesy and speech. It occurred to me that it was very democratic, because everybody from top to bottom had a title.

When you said your prayers for breakfast, you could include the wish for toast: you could say“O Señor Dios … O Mister God, I like the jungles you have created, but I wish you hadn’t left out the buttered toast for breakfast.” Likewise, my Indian guide Sandoval was Senor Esteban Sandoval y Garrazatua, and any ragged Indian or peon you met and bowed to was Señor, also. And everybody was Your Grace, by reason of the King’s Spanish. That is, everybody except those listed in an old Spanish grammar I have. Those not entitled to a title are: children, servants, animals, and members of your own family. They rate the informal tu, rather than the austere vuestra merced.

Sandoval has picked me out of the mud many times where I have been catapulted by a mule, to inquire anxiously whether My Grace had been injured. Very often my pride had been, to say nothing of more strategic and solid parts of me. And once when we were traveling a dangerous river in a dug-out canoe guided by the painted forest Indians, we struck a whirlpool that sent the Indian in the bow headlong into the river, and Sandoval over the side. I was somewhat somnolent from the effect of the tropic mid-day sun, and I didn’t realize, until I heard Sandoval shouting, “Jump, Your Grace, jump,” that we were really in a rather tight spot. Her Grace did jump, rather gracefully, into the river, from which she was hauled by divers Indians. But not before I had found the unbleached muslin bag in which I carried my passport and money.

The Indians rescued the canoe, dragging it to safety on a little sandy beach, with the loss of only part of a roast chicken—which was, however, a rather serious loss, because the chicken was practically all we had to eat until we should reach a settlement by nightfall. And I thought … if the canoe had been wrecked in the whirlpool, leaving us in the middle of a trackless jungle where the river was the only means of travel, how smart of me to have thought of a passport instead of the precious chicken! Food, I discovered, can be an absorbing topic for thought in a jungle.

So, after pondering the exquisite manners that you find even in the remotest of South American jungles, I began to think about breakfast as I walked back from the bathroom to the house on stilts. The kitchen was not on stilts; it was a thatch mounted on poles beside the little perched-up hut that swayed even in the slightest breeze. The floors of the hut were made of palm bark, and the effect of walking on them was something like walking on bed springs. The kitchen was solidly on earth because the stove consisted of three or four logs on the ground, the burning points touching to hold a cooking pot. Sandoval had been to the river and had water boiling for coffee.

“Now,” I said, “what would Your Grace like for breakfast?” as he poured a generous amount of black native coffee, which was always good, into the pot. I surveyed the wire line which Sandoval had rigged up under the thatch, and which was hung with various small muslin bags I had made to contain the food. This line was part of my strategic generalship, as warfare was incessant and bitter, for my enemies were diabolically clever. And legion.