The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read online

  He felt his voice would break and stopped speaking.

  “Did he discuss Thomas à Kempis with you?”

  “He was very devoted to him,” Roger agreed. “He gave me his copy of The Imitation of Christ. But I couldn’t read it then. I didn’t have the head for it with all the concerns I had at the time. I left that copy in Germany, in a suitcase with my clothes. They didn’t allow us to carry luggage on the submarine. Just as well you found me another one. I’m afraid I won’t have time to finish it.”

  “The British government hasn’t decided anything yet,” the priest admonished him. “You mustn’t lose hope. There are many people outside who love you and are making enormous efforts to have the petition for clemency heard.”

  “I know that, Father Carey. In any event, I’d like you to prepare me. I want to be accepted formally by the Church. Receive the sacraments. Make my confession. Take communion.”

  “That’s why I’m here, Roger. I assure you you’re already prepared for all of that.”

  “One doubt distresses me a great deal,” said Roger, lowering his voice as if someone else might hear him. “Won’t my conversion to Christ seem inspired by fear? The truth is, Father Carey, I’m afraid. Very afraid.”

  “He is wiser than you and me,” the priest declared. “I don’t believe Christ sees anything wrong in a man being afraid. He was, I’m sure, on the road to Calvary. It’s the most human thing there is, isn’t it? We all feel fear, it’s part of our condition. Just a little sensitivity is enough for us to sometimes feel powerless and frightened. Your approach to the Church is pure, Roger. I know that.”

  “I was never afraid of death until now. I saw it at close range many times. In the Congo, on expeditions through inhospitable places filled with wild animals. In Amazonia, in rivers filled with whirlpools and surrounded by outlaws. Just a short while ago, when I left the submarine at Tralee, on Banna Strand, when the rowboat capsized and it seemed we would all drown. I’ve often felt death very close. And I wasn’t afraid. But I am now.”

  His voice broke and he closed his eyes. For some days now these rushes of terror seemed to freeze his blood, stop his heart. His entire body had begun to tremble. He made an effort to be calm but failed. He felt the chattering of his teeth and to his panic was added embarrassment. When he opened his eyes he saw that Father Carey had his hands together and his eyes closed. He was praying in silence, barely moving his lips.

  “It’s passed,” he mumbled in confusion. “I beg you to forgive me.”

  “You don’t have to feel uncomfortable with me. Being afraid, weeping, is human.”

  Now he was calm again. There was a great silence in Pentonville Prison, as if the prisoners and the jailers in its three enormous pavilions, those blocks with gable roofs, had died or fallen asleep.

  “I thank you for not asking me anything about those loathsome things they apparently are saying about me, Father Carey.”

  “I haven’t read them, Roger. When someone has attempted to talk to me about them, I’ve made him be quiet. I don’t know and don’t want to know what that’s about.”

  “I don’t know either,” Roger said with a smile. “You can’t read newspapers here. One of my lawyer’s clerks told me they were so scandalous they put the petition for clemency at risk. Degeneracies, terrible vileness, it seems.”

  Father Carey listened to him with his usual tranquil expression. The first time they had spoken in Pentonville, he told Roger that his paternal grandparents spoke Gaelic to each other but changed to English when they saw their children nearby. The priest hadn’t succeeded in learning ancient Irish either.

  “I believe it’s better not to know what they’re accusing me of. Alice Stopford Green thinks it’s an operation mounted by the government to counteract the sympathy in many sectors for the petition for clemency.”

  “Nothing can be excluded in the world of politics,” said the priest. “It’s not the cleanest of human activities.”

  There were some discreet knocks at the door, which opened, and the sheriff’s plump face appeared:

  “Five more minutes, Father Carey.”

  “The director of the prison gave me half an hour. Weren’t you told?”

  The sheriff’s face showed surprise.

  “If you say so, I believe you.” He apologized. “Excuse the interruption, then. You still have twenty minutes.”

  He disappeared and the door closed again.

  “Is there more news from Ireland?” Roger asked, somewhat abruptly, as if he suddenly wanted to change the subject.

  “It seems the shootings have stopped. Public opinion, not only there but in England, too, has been very critical of the summary executions. Now the government has announced that all those arrested in the Easter Rising will pass through the courts.”

  Roger became distracted. He looked at the window in the wall, also barred. He saw only a tiny square of gray sky and thought about the great paradox: he had been tried and sentenced for carrying arms for an attempt at violent secession by Ireland, and in fact he had undertaken that dangerous, perhaps absurd trip from Germany to the coast near Tralee to try to stop the uprising he was sure would fail from the moment he learned it was being prepared. Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists.

  “It’s likely I’ll go down in history as one of those responsible for the Easter Rising,” he said with irony. “You and I know I came here risking my life to try to stop that rebellion.”

  “Well, you and I and someone else,” Father Carey said with a laugh, pointing up with a finger.

  “Now I feel better, finally.” Roger laughed as well. “The panic has passed. In Africa I often saw blacks as well as whites fall suddenly into a crisis of despair. In the middle of the undergrowth, when we lost our way. When we entered a territory the African porters considered hostile. In the middle of the river, when a canoe overturned. Or in the villages sometimes, during ceremonies with singing and dancing directed by witch doctors. Now I know what those hallucinatory states brought on by fear are like. Are the trances of the mystics the same, the suspension of oneself and all carnal reflexes produced by the encounter with God?”

  “It’s not impossible,” said Father Carey. “Perhaps the path traveled by the mystics and by all those who experience trance states is the same. Poets, musicians, sorcerers.”

  They were silent for a long while. At times, out of the corner of his eye, Roger observed the priest and saw him motionless, his eyes closed. He’s praying for me, he thought. He’s a compassionate man. It must be terrible to spend your life helping people who are going to die on the gallows. Without ever having been in the Congo or Amazonia, Father Carey must be as well informed as he about the dizzying extremes reached by human cruelty and despair.

  “For many years I was indifferent to religion,” he said, very slowly, as if talking to himself, “but I never stopped believing in God. In a general principle of life. Though it’s true, Father Carey, I often asked myself in horror how God could permit things like this to happen. What kind of God tolerates so many thousands of men, women, and children suffering such horrors? It’s difficult to understand, isn’t it? You must have seen so many things in the prisons; don’t you sometimes ask the same questions?”

  Father Carey had opened his eyes and listened to him with his usual courteous expression, not affirming or denying.

  “Those poor people whipped, mutilated, those children with their hands and feet chopped off, dying of hunger and disease,” Roger recited. “Those creatures squeezed to extinction and then murdered. Thousands, dozens, hundreds of thousands. By men who received a Christian ed
ucation. I have seen them go to Mass, pray, take communion, before and after committing those crimes. Many days I thought I’d go mad, Father Carey. Perhaps, during those years in Africa, in Putumayo, I did. And everything that has happened to me since has been the work of someone who, though he didn’t realize it, was crazy.”

  The chaplain didn’t say anything this time either. He listened with the same affable expression and patience for which Roger had always been grateful.

  “Curiously, I believe it was in the Congo, when I had those periods of great demoralization and asked myself how God could permit so many crimes, that I began to be interested in religion again,” he continued. “Because the only beings who seemed to have maintained their sanity were some Baptist ministers and Catholic missionaries. Not all of them, of course. Many did not want to see what was happening past their own noses. But a few did what they could to stop the injustices. Real heroes.”

  He fell silent. Recalling the Congo or Putumayo did him harm: it stirred up the mud in his spirit, brought back images that plunged him into anguish.

  “Injustices, tortures, crimes,” murmured Father Carey. “Didn’t Christ suffer these in his own flesh? He can understand your state better than anyone, Roger. Of course the same thing happens to me at times. To all believers, I’m sure. It’s difficult to understand certain things, naturally. Our capacity for understanding is limited. We are fallible, imperfect. But I can tell you one thing. You’ve made many mistakes, like all human beings. But with regard to the Congo, to Amazonia, you cannot reproach yourself for anything. Your labor was generous and brave. You made many people open their eyes, you helped to correct great injustices.”

  All the good I could have done is being destroyed by this campaign launched to ruin my reputation, Roger thought. It was a subject he preferred not to touch, one he pushed out of his mind each time it returned. The good thing about Father Carey’s visits was that with the chaplain, he spoke only about what he wanted to. The priest’s discretion was absolute, and he seemed to guess everything that might disturb Roger and avoided it. At times they did not say a word for a long while. Even so, the presence of the priest calmed him. When he left, Roger would remain serene and resigned for some hours.

  “If the petition is rejected, will you be with me until the end?” he asked, not looking at him.

  “Of course,” said Father Carey. “You shouldn’t think about that. Nothing has been decided yet.”

  “I know that, Father Carey. I haven’t lost hope. But it does me good to know you will be there with me. Your presence will give me courage. I won’t make an unfortunate scene, I promise.”

  “Would you like us to pray together?”

  “Let’s talk a little more, if you don’t mind. This will be the last question I’ll ask you about the matter. If I’m executed, can my body be taken to Ireland and buried there?”

  He sensed the chaplain hesitating and looked at him. Father Carey had paled slightly. He saw his discomfort as he shook his head.

  “No, Roger. If that happens, you’ll be buried in the prison cemetery.”

  “In enemy territory,” Roger murmured, trying to make a joke that failed. “In a country I’ve come to hate as much as I loved and admired it as a young man.”

  “Hate doesn’t serve any purpose,” Father Carey said with a sigh. “The policies of England may be bad. But there are many decent, respectable English people.”

  “I know that very well, Father. I tell myself that whenever I fill with hatred toward this country. It’s stronger than I am. Perhaps it happens because as a boy I believed blindly in the Empire and that England was civilizing the world. You would have laughed if you had known me then.”

  The priest agreed and Roger suddenly gave a little laugh.

  “They say converts are the worst,” he added. “My friends have always reproached me. Being too impassioned.”

  “The incorrigible Irishman of legend,” said Father Carey, smiling. “My mother used to say that when I was little and misbehaved, ‘Your incorrigible Irishman got out.’”

  “If you like, we can pray now, Father.”

  Father Carey closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and began to murmur very quietly an Our Father, and then some Hail Marys. Roger closed his eyes and prayed as well, not letting his voice be heard. For a time he did this mechanically, without concentrating, while various images whirled around his head, until gradually he allowed himself to be absorbed by the prayer. When the sheriff knocked on the door of the visitors’ room and came in to warn them they had five minutes left, Roger was focused on the invocation.

  Whenever he prayed he thought of his mother, that slim figure dressed in white, a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon that danced in the wind, walking under the trees in a field. Were they in Wales, in Ireland, in Antrim, in Jersey? He didn’t know where, but the countryside was as beautiful as the smile shining on Anne Jephson’s face. How proud young Roger felt holding the soft, tender hand that gave him so much security and joy. Praying like this was a marvelous balm, it brought back to him a childhood when, thanks to his mother’s presence, everything in life was beautiful and happy.

  Father Carey asked if he wanted to send a message to anyone, if he could bring him anything on his next visit.

  “All I want is to see you again, Father. You don’t know the good it does me to talk and listen to you.”

  They parted with a handshake. In the long, damp corridor, without having planned it, Roger said to the sheriff:

  “I’m very sorry about the death of your son. I haven’t had children. I imagine there’s no more terrible pain in this life.”

  The sheriff made a small noise with his throat but did not respond. In his cell, Roger lay on his cot and picked up The Imitation of Christ. But he couldn’t concentrate. The letters danced before his eyes and in his head images threw out sparks in a mad round. The figure of Anne Jephson appeared more than once.

  What would his life have been like if his mother, instead of dying so young, had been alive as he became an adolescent, a man? He probably would not have undertaken the African adventure. He would have remained in Ireland or in Liverpool and had a bureaucratic career and an honorable, obscure, and comfortable life with a wife and children. He smiled: no, that kind of life wasn’t for him. The one he had led, with all its misfortunes, was preferable. He had seen the world, his horizons had broadened enormously, he had a better understanding of life, human reality, the innermost core of colonialism, the tragedy of so many peoples caused by that aberration.

  If Anne Jephson had lived he would not have discovered the sad, beautiful history of Ireland, the one they never taught him in Ballymena High School, the history still hidden from the children and adolescents of North Antrim. They were still made to believe that Ireland was a savage country with no past worth remembering, raised to civilization by the occupier, educated and modernized by the Empire, which stripped it of its tradition, language, and sovereignty. He had learned all this in Africa, where he never would have spent the best years of his youth and early maturity, or ever come to feel so much pride in the country where he was born and so much rage because of what Great Britain had done, if his mother had lived.

  Were they justified, the sacrifices of his twenty years in Africa, the seven in South America, the year or so in the heart of the Amazonian jungles, the year and a half of loneliness, sickness, and frustration in Germany? He never had cared about money, but wasn’t it absurd that after having worked so hard all his life, he was now a pauper? The last balance in his bank account had been ten pounds sterling. He had never learned to save. He had spent all his income on others—on his three siblings, on humanitarian organizations such as the Congo Reform Association, and on Irish nationalist institutions such as St. Enda’s School and the Gaelic League, to which for some time he had handed over his entire income. In order to spend money on those causes he had lived very austerely, residing for long periods of time in very cheap boardinghouses not appropriate to his rank,
as his colleagues at the Foreign Office had insinuated. No one would remember the donations, gifts, or assistance now that he had failed. Only his final defeat would be remembered.

  But that was not the worst thing. Devil take it, the damn idea was back again. Degeneracies, perversions, vices, all human lewdness. That is what the British government wanted to remain of him. Not the diseases that the rigors of Africa had inflicted on him, jaundice, the malarial fevers that undermined his organism, arthritis, the surgeries for hemorrhoids, the rectal problems that had caused him so much suffering and shame from the first time an anal fissure had to be operated on in 1893.

  “You should have come earlier, this operation would have been simple three or four months ago. Now it’s serious.”

  “I live in Africa, doctor, in Boma, a place where my physician is a confirmed alcoholic whose hands tremble because of delirium tremens. Was I going to be operated on by Dr. Salabert, whose medical science is inferior to that of a Bakongo witch doctor?”

  He had suffered from this almost his entire life. A few months earlier, in the German camp at Limburg, he’d had a hemorrhage sutured by a surly, coarse military doctor. When he decided to accept the responsibility of investigating the atrocities committed by the rubber barons in Amazonia, he was already very ill. He knew the effort would take him months and bring him only problems, and still he took it on, thinking he was serving justice. That part of him wouldn’t remain either if they executed him.

  Could it be true that Father Carey had refused to read the scandalous things attributed to him by the press? The chaplain was a good man who displayed solidarity. If he had to die, having the priest near would help him maintain his dignity to the last moment.

  Demoralization overwhelmed him completely. It turned him into a being as helpless as the Congolese attacked by the tsetse fly, whom sleeping sickness prevented from moving arms, feet, lips, or even keeping eyes open. Did it keep them from thinking as well? Unfortunately, these gusts of pessimism sharpened his lucidity, turned his brain into a crackling bonfire. The pages of the diary handed by the admiralty spokesman to the press, which so horrified the red-faced assistant to Maître Gavan Duffy, were they real or falsified? He thought of the stupidity that formed a central part of human nature, and also, naturally, of himself. He was very thorough and well known, as a diplomat, for not taking any initiative or the slightest step without foreseeing all possible consequences. And now, here he was, caught in a stupid trap he had constructed throughout his life, giving his enemies a weapon that would sink him in disrepute.