The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (9 page)

Konrad had made a voyage in
Le roi des Belges
, back and forth between Leopoldville–Kinshasa and Stanley Falls. Everything had gone wrong on that trip to Kisangani. He almost drowned when a canoe overturned and its inexpert rowers were trapped in a whirlpool near Kinshasa. Malaria kept him in bed in his small cabin with attacks of fever, without the strength to stand. There he learned that the previous captain of
Le roi des Belges
had been shot dead by arrows in a dispute with the natives of a village. Another official of the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, whom Konrad had gone to pick up in a remote settlement where he was harvesting ivory and rubber, died of an unknown disease in the course of the voyage. But the physical misfortunes that had plagued him were not what had so disturbed the Pole.

“It’s the moral corruption, the corruption of the soul that invades everything in this country,” he repeated in a hollow, gloomy voice, as if horrified by an apocalyptic vision.

“I tried to prepare you when we first met,” Roger reminded him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more explicit about what you were going to find on the Upper Congo.”

What had affected him so deeply? Discovering that very primitive practices like cannibalism were still current in some communities? That among the tribes and in commercial posts, slaves were still circulating who changed masters for a few francs? That the supposed liberators subjected the Congolese to even crueler forms of oppression and servitude? Had he been overwhelmed by the sight of the natives’ backs cut by the lash of the
chicote
? Did he see for the first time in his life a white flog a black until his body had been transformed into a crossword puzzle of wounds? He didn’t ask for details, but the captain of
Le roi des Belges
had undoubtedly been witness to terrible things when he waived his three-year contract in order to return to England as soon as possible. Further, he told Roger that in Leopoldville–Kinshasa, on his return from Stanley Falls, he’d had a violent argument with the director of the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, Camille Delcom-mune, whom he called a “savage in a vest and hat.” Now he wanted to return to civilization, which for him meant England.

“Have you read
Heart of Darkness
?” Roger asked Alice. “Do you think that vision of human beings is fair?”

“I assume it isn’t,” replied the historian. “We discussed it a great deal one Tuesday, after it came out. That novel is a parable according to which Africa turns the civilized Europeans who go there into barbarians. Your Congo report showed the opposite. That we Europeans were the ones who brought the worst barbarities there. Besides, you were in Africa for twenty years without becoming a savage. In fact, you came back more civilized than when you left here believing in the virtues of colonialism and the Empire.”

“Conrad said that in the Congo, the moral corruption of human beings rose to the surface, in whites as well as blacks.
Heart of Darkness
often kept me awake. I don’t think it describes the Congo, or reality, or history, but hell. The Congo is a pretext for expressing the awful vision that certain Catholics have of absolute evil.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the guard, turning toward them. “It’s been fifteen minutes and the visitor’s permit was for ten. You’ll have to say goodbye.”

Roger extended his hand to Alice, but to his surprise, she opened her arms. She gave him a warm embrace. “We’ll keep doing everything, everything, to save your life, Roger,” she whispered in his ear. He thought:
For Alice to permit herself this much effusiveness, she must be convinced the petition will be rejected.

As he returned to his cell, he felt sad. Would he see Alice Stopford Green again? She represented so much to him! No one embodied as much as she did his passion for Ireland, the last of his passions, the most intense, the most recalcitrant, a passion that had consumed him and probably would send him to his death. “I don’t regret it,” he repeated to himself. The many centuries of oppression had caused so much pain in Ireland, so much injustice, that it was worth having sacrificed himself to this noble cause. No doubt he had failed. The plan so carefully structured to accelerate the emancipation of Ireland, associating her struggle with Germany and coordinating an offensive action by the Kaiser’s army and navy against Britain with the nationalist uprising, did not work out as he had foreseen. And he wasn’t able to stop the rebellion. And now Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, and so many others had been shot. Hundreds of comrades would rot in prison, God only knew for how many years. At least his example remained, as a weakened Joseph Plunkett said with fierce determination in Berlin. An example of devotion, of love, of sacrifice for a cause similar to the one that made him fight against Leopold II in the Congo, against Julio C. Arana and the Putumayo rubber planters in Amazonia. The cause of justice, of the helpless against the abuses of the powerful and the despotic. Would the campaign calling him a degenerate and a traitor succeed in erasing all the rest? In the end, what difference did it make? The important things were being decided on high; the God who at last, after so much time, was beginning to commiserate with him, had the final word.

As he lay on the cot on his back, his eyes closed, Joseph Conrad came to mind again. Would he have felt better if the former sailor had signed the petition? Maybe yes, maybe no. What had he meant that night, in his house in Kent, when he declared: “Before I went to the Congo, I was nothing more than a poor animal”? The phrase had made an impression on Roger, though he didn’t understand it entirely. What did it mean? Perhaps that what he did, failed to do, saw, and heard in those six months on the Middle and Upper Congo had wakened more profound and transcendent concerns regarding the human condition, original sin, evil, and history. Roger could understand that very well. The Congo had humanized him as well, if being human meant knowing the extremes that could be reached by greed, avarice, prejudice, and cruelty. That’s what moral corruption was: something that did not exist in animals but belonged exclusively to humans. The Congo had revealed to him that those things were part of life. It had opened his eyes, “deflowered” him as well as the Pole. Then he thought that he had arrived in Africa, at the age of twenty, still a virgin. Wasn’t it unjust that the press, as the sheriff of Pentonville Prison had told him, accused only him, among the vast human species, of being scum?

To combat the demoralization that was overwhelming him, he tried to imagine the pleasure it would be to take a long bath in a tub, with a great deal of water and soap, holding another naked body against his.

VI

He left Matadi on June 5, 1903, on the railroad constructed by Stanley and on which he had worked as a young man. For the two days of the slow journey to Leopoldville, he thought obsessively about an athletic feat of his youth: having been the first white to swim in the Nkissi, the largest river along the caravan route between Manyanga and Stanley Pool. He had already done this, with total unawareness, in smaller rivers along the Lower and Middle Congo, the Kwilo, the Lukungu, the Mpozo, and the Lunzadi, where there were also crocodiles, and nothing had happened to him. But the Nkissi was larger and more torrential, some one hundred yards wide, and filled with whirlpools due to the proximity of the great waterfall. The natives warned him it was imprudent, he could be swept away and smashed against the rocks. In fact, after a few strokes, Roger felt pulled by the legs and forced toward the middle of the river by contrary currents he could not get clear of in spite of energetic kicks and arm strokes. When he was losing his strength—he had already swallowed water—he managed to approach the bank by letting a wave knock him down. There he clutched at some rocks the best he could. When he climbed the slope he was covered with scrapes and his heart was pounding.

The trip he finally undertook lasted three months and ten days. Roger would think afterward that during this time his very being changed and he became another man, more lucid and realistic than he had been before, about the Congo, Africa, human beings, colonialism, Ireland, and life. But that experience also made him a man more given to unhappiness. For the rest of his life he would often say to himself, in moments of discouragement, that it would have been preferable not to have made the journey to the Middle and Upper Congo to verify how much truth lay in the accusations of abuses against the indigenous population in the rubber zones, made in London by certain churches and the journalist Edmund D. Morel, who seemed to have devoted his life to criticizing Leopold II and the Congo Free State.

On the first section of the trip between Matadi and Leopoldville he was surprised at how empty the countryside was; villages like Tumba, where he spent the night, and others scattered along the valleys of Nsele and Ndolo, which once teemed with people, were semideserted, with spectral old people shuffling their feet through clouds of dust or squatting against tree trunks, their eyes closed, as if dead or sleeping.

In those three months and ten days the impression of depopulation and the disappearance of people—the vanished villages and settlements where he had been, spent the night, done business fifteen or sixteen years earlier—was repeated over and over again, like a nightmare, in all the regions along the Congo River and its tributaries, or in the interior, in the stops Roger made to collect the testimony of missionaries, functionaries, officers and soldiers of the Force Publique, and natives whom he could question in Lingala, Kikongo, and Swahili, or in their languages making use of interpreters. Where were the people? Memory was not deceiving him. In his mind was the human effervescence, the flocks of children, women, tattooed men, with their filed incisors, necklaces of teeth, at times spears and masks, who had once surrounded him, examining and touching him. How was it possible that they had ceased to exist in so short a time? Some villages had been wiped out, in others the population had been reduced by half, by two-thirds, even by 90 percent. In some places he could confirm precise numbers. Lukolela, for example, in 1884, when Roger visited that populous community for the first time, had more than 5,000 inhabitants. Now there were just 352, most in a ruinous state because of age or disease, so that after his inspection, Roger concluded that only 82 survivors were still able to work. How had more than 4,000 inhabitants of Lukolela gone up in smoke?

The explanations of the government agents, the employees of the companies harvesting rubber, the officers of the Force Publique were always the same: the blacks died like flies because of sleeping sickness, smallpox, typhus, colds, pneumonia, malarial fevers, and other plagues that, because of poor nutrition, decimated those unable to resist disease. It was true, those epidemics were devastating. Sleeping sickness especially, carried by the tsetse fly, as had been discovered a few years earlier, attacked the blood and brain and produced in its victims a paralysis of the limbs and a lethargy from which they never emerged. But at this point in his journey, Roger continued asking the reason for the depopulation of the Congo, not searching for an answer but to confirm that the lies he heard were slogans everyone repeated. He knew the answer very well. The plague that had vaporized a good part of the Congolese from the Middle and Upper Congo was composed of greed, cruelty, rubber, an inhumane system, and the implacable exploitation of Africans by European colonists.

In Leopoldville he decided that to preserve his independence and not find himself coerced by the authorities, he would not use any form of official transport. With the authorization of the Foreign Office, he rented the
Henry Reed
and its crew from the American Baptist Missionary Union. The negotiation was slow, as was the gathering of wood and provisions for the journey. His stay in Leopoldville–Kinshasa had to be extended from June 6 to July 2, when they set sail upriver. The delay was a good idea. The freedom it gave him to travel in his own boat and drop anchor where he wished allowed him to verify things he never would have discovered if he had been subject to colonial institutions. And he never could have had so many dialogues with the Africans themselves, who dared approach him only when they determined he was not accompanied by any Belgian military or civil authority.

Leopoldville had grown a great deal since the last time Roger had been there six or seven years earlier. It was filled with houses, warehouses, missions, offices, courts, customs offices, inspectors, judges, accountants, officers and soldiers, shops, and markets. There were priests and ministers everywhere. Something in the growing city displeased him from the start. He was not received badly. From the governor to the police chief, including the judges and inspectors whom he went to greet, and the Protestant ministers and Catholic missionaries he visited, everyone met him with cordiality. They all were willing to give him the information he asked for, even though it might be, as he would confirm in the following weeks, evasive or shamelessly false. He felt that something hostile and oppressive filled the air and the profile the city was acquiring. On the other hand, Brazzaville, the neighboring capital of the French Congo that stood on the opposite bank of the river, which he visited a few times, made a much less oppressive, even a pleasant, impression on him, perhaps because of its open, well-designed streets and the good humor of its people. In it he did not detect the secretly ominous atmosphere of Leopoldville. In the almost four weeks he spent there, negotiating the rental of the
Henry Reed
, he obtained a good many facts but always with the feeling that no one was getting to the bottom of things, that even people with the best intentions were hiding something from him and from themselves, fearful of confronting a terrible, accusatory truth.

Herbert Ward would tell him afterward that it was all pure prejudice, that the things he saw and heard in subsequent weeks retroactively muddied his memory of Leopoldville. If not for this, his memory would retain more than negative images of his stay in the city founded by Henry Morton Stanley in 1881. One morning, following a long walk to take advantage of the cool part of the day, Roger went as far as the wharf. There, suddenly, his attention focused on two dark, half-naked boys unloading some launches and singing. They looked very young. They wore light loincloths not long enough to hide the shape of their buttocks. Both were slim, supple, and with the rhythmic movements they made unloading the bundles, they gave an impression of health, harmony, and beauty. He watched them for a long time. He regretted not having his camera with him. He would have liked to take their picture in order to recall afterward that not everything was ugly and sordid in the emerging city of Leopoldville.