The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read online

  He prepared the journey with his customary meticulousness and an enthusiasm he hid from Belgian functionaries and the colonists and merchants of Boma. Now, with a thorough knowledge of the subject, he would be able to argue to his superiors that the Empire, faithful to its tradition of justice and fair play, should lead an international campaign to put an end to this ignominy. But then, in the middle of 1902, he had his third attack of malaria, one even worse than the previous two; he had suffered from the disease ever since he had decided in 1884, in an outburst of idealism and a dream of adventure, to leave Europe and come to Africa to work, by means of commerce, for Christianity, western social and political institutions, and the emancipation of Africans from backwardness, disease, and ignorance.

  They weren’t merely words. He had a profound belief in them when, at the age of twenty, he reached the Dark Continent. The first attacks of malaria came some time later. He had just realized his life’s desire: to be part of an expedition headed by the most famous adventurer on African soil, Henry Morton Stanley. To serve at the pleasure of the explorer who in a legendary trek of close to three years between 1874 and 1877 had crossed Africa from east to west, following the course of the Congo River from its source to its mouth at the Atlantic! To accompany the hero who found the missing Dr. Livingstone! Then, as if the gods wanted to extinguish his exaltation, he suffered his first attack of malaria. Nothing, compared with the second, three years later—1887—and above all this third attack, in 1902, when for the first time he thought he would die. The symptoms were the same that dawn in the middle of 1902 when, his traveling bag already packed with maps, compass, pencils, and notebooks, he felt himself trembling with cold as he opened his eyes in the bedroom on the top floor of his house in Boma, in the colonists’ district, a few steps from Government House, which served as the consul’s residence and office. He moved aside the mosquito netting and saw through the windows, without glass or curtains but with metal screens to keep out insects and riddled now by a downpour, the muddy waters of the great river and the outline of islands covered with vegetation. He couldn’t stand. His legs collapsed under him, as if they were made of rags. John, his bulldog, was frightened and began to jump and bark. He let himself fall back into bed. His body was burning and the cold penetrated his bones. He shouted for Charlie and Mawuku, the Congolese steward and cook who slept on the lower floor, but no one answered. They must have gone out and, caught by the storm, run to take shelter under a baobab tree until it abated. Malaria again? The consul cursed. Just on the eve of the expedition? He would have diarrhea; hemorrhages and weakness would oblige him to stay in bed for days, weeks, dazed and shivering.

  Charlie was the first of the servants to return, dripping water. “Go for Dr. Salabert,” Roger ordered, not in French but in Lingala. Dr. Salabert was one of two physicians in Boma, the old slave-trade port—it was called Mboma then—where, in the sixteenth century, Portuguese traffickers from the island of São Tomé came to buy slaves from the tribal chiefs of the vanished Kingdom of the Kongo, transformed now by the Belgians into the capital of the Congo Free State. Unlike Matadi, in Boma there was no hospital, only a dispensary staffed by two Flemish nuns for emergency cases. The doctor arrived half an hour later, shuffling his feet and leaning on a cane. He was younger than he seemed, but the harsh climate, and especially alcohol, had aged him. He looked like an old man and dressed like a vagabond. His high shoes had no laces and his vest was unbuttoned. Even though the day was just beginning, his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Yes, my friend, malaria, what else would it be. What a fever. You know the treatment: quinine, abundant fluids, a diet of broth and biscuits, and lots of blankets to sweat out the infections. Don’t even dream of getting up before two weeks. And certainly not of going on a trip, not even to the corner. Tertian fevers demolish the organism, as you know all too well.”

  It wasn’t for two but three weeks that he was devastated by fevers and fits of shivering. He lost twenty pounds, and on the first day he could stand, he took a few steps and fell to the floor exhausted, in a state of weakness he did not recall having felt before. Dr. Salabert, staring into his eyes, warned him in a cavernous voice and with acid humor:

  “In your condition it would be suicide to go on that expedition. Your body is in ruins and would not survive even a crossing of the Crystal Mountains, much less several weeks of living outdoors. You wouldn’t even reach Mbanza-Ngungu. There are faster ways to kill yourself, Consul: a bullet in the mouth or an injection of strychnine. If you need them, you can count on me. I’ve helped several people undertake the great journey.”

  Roger telegraphed the Foreign Office that the state of his health obliged him to postpone the expedition. And since the rains made the forests and river impassable then, the expedition to the interior of the Congo Free State had to wait a few more months that would eventually turn into a year. Another year, recovering very slowly from the fevers and trying to regain the weight he had lost, picking up the tennis racket again, swimming, playing bridge or chess to pass the long nights in Boma, while he resumed his tedious consular tasks: making note of the ships that arrived and departed, the goods the merchant ships of Antwerp unloaded—rifles, munitions, chicote whips, wine, holy pictures, crucifixes, colored glass beads—and the ones they carried to Europe, the immense stacks of rubber, ivory, and animal skins. This was the exchange that in his youthful imagination was going to save the Congolese from cannibalism and from the Arab merchants of Zanzibar who controlled the slave trade, and open the doors of civilization to them!

  For three weeks he was laid low by malarial fevers, at times delirious, taking drops of quinine dissolved in herbal infusions that Charlie and Mawuku prepared for him three times a day—his stomach tolerated only broth and pieces of boiled fish or chicken—and playing with John, his most loyal companion. He did not even have the energy to concentrate on reading.

  During this forced inactivity, Roger often thought about the expedition of 1884 under the leadership of his hero, Henry Morton Stanley. He had lived in the forests, visited countless indigenous villages, made camp in clearings surrounded by stockades of trees where monkeys screeched and wild beasts roared. He was tense and happy in spite of the bites of mosquitoes and other insects, against which rubbing with camphorated alcohol was useless. He swam in lagoons and rivers of dazzling beauty with no fear of crocodiles, still convinced that by doing what they were doing, he, the four hundred African porters, guides, and assistants, the twenty whites—English, German, Flemish, Walloon, French—who made up the expedition, and, of course, Stanley himself, constituted the tip of the lance of progress in this world where the Stone Age that Europe had left behind many centuries earlier was only just beginning to be visible.

  Years later, in the visionary half-sleep of fever, he blushed to think how blind he had been. He had not even been aware, at first, of the reason for the expedition led by Stanley and financed by the king of the Belgians, then considered—by Europe, the West, the world—to be a great humanitarian monarch bent on exterminating the social degradations of slavery and cannibalism and freeing the tribes from the paganism and servitude that kept them in a feral state.

  It would be another year before the great Western powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885 granted Leopold II the Congo Free State, more than a million square miles—eighty-five times the size of Belgium—but the king of the Belgians had already begun to administer the territory they were going to give him so he could put his redemptive principles into practice with the estimated twenty million Congolese believed to inhabit it. The monarch with the combed beard had contracted the great Stanley to that end, guessing, with his prodigious aptitude for detecting human weaknesses, that the explorer was equally capable of great deeds and formidable villainies if the prize was on a level with his appetites.

  The apparent reason for the 1884 expedition in which Roger served his apprenticeship as an explorer was to prepare the communities scattered along the banks of the Upper, Middle, and Lower
Congo, in thousands of miles of dense jungles, gorges, waterfalls, and mountains thick with vegetation, for the arrival of the European merchants and administrators that the International Congo Society (AIC), presided over by Leopold II, would bring in once the Western powers granted him the concession. Stanley and his companions had to explain to the half-naked chieftains, tattooed and feathered, sometimes with thorns in their faces and arms, sometimes with reed funnels on their penises, the benevolent intentions of the Europeans: they would come to help them improve their living conditions, rid them of deadly plagues such as sleeping sickness, educate them, and open their eyes to the truths of this world and the next, thanks to which their children and grandchildren would attain a life that was decent, just, and free.

  I wasn’t aware because I didn’t want to be aware, he thought. Charlie had covered him with all the blankets in the house. In spite of that and the blazing sun outside, the consul, curled up and freezing, trembled beneath the mosquito net like a sheet of paper. But worse than being a willing blind man was finding explanations for what any impartial observer would have called a swindle. Because in all the villages reached by the expedition of 1884, after distributing beads and trinkets, and then the aforementioned explanations made by interpreters (many of whom could not make themselves understood by the natives), Stanley had the chiefs and witch doctors sign contracts, written in French, pledging to provide manual labor, lodging, guides, and food to the officials, agents, and employees of the AIC in the work they would undertake to achieve the goals that inspired the Society. They signed with Xs, lines, blots, drawings, without a word and without knowing what they were signing or what signing was, amused by the necklaces, bracelets, and adornments of colored glass they received and the little swallows of liquor with which Stanley invited them to toast their agreement.

  They don’t know what they’re doing, but we know it’s for their good and that justifies the deceit, the young Roger Casement thought. What other way was there to do it? How could they give legitimacy to future colonization with people who could not understand a word of those “treaties” in which their future and the future of their descendants was placed under obligation? It was necessary to give some legal form to the enterprise the Belgian monarch wanted to realize by means of persuasion and dialogue, unlike others carried out with blood and fire, invasions, assassinations, and plunder. Wasn’t this peaceable and civil?

  As the years passed—eighteen had gone by since the expedition carried out under Stanley’s leadership in 1884—Roger reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted onto the continent of Africa. In spite of that, like everyone who had worked under his command, he could not fail to acknowledge his charisma, his affability, his magic, that mixture of temerity and cold calculation with which the adventurer accumulated great feats. He came and went through Africa, on one hand sowing desolation and death—burning and looting villages, shooting natives, flaying the backs of his porters with the chicotes made of strips of hippopotamus hide that had left thousands of scars on ebony bodies throughout Africa—and on the other opening routes to commerce and evangelization in immense territories filled with wild beasts, predatory insects, and epidemics, which seemed to respect him like one of those titans of Homeric legends and biblical histories.

  “Don’t you sometimes feel remorse, have a bad conscience because of what we’re doing?”

  The question burst from the young man’s lips in an unpremeditated way. And he could not take it back. The flames from the bonfire in the center of the camp crackled as small branches and imprudent insects burned there.

  “Remorse? A bad conscience?” The head of the expedition wrinkled his nose and the expression on his freckled, sunburned face soured, as if he never had heard those words and was trying to guess what they meant. “For what?”

  “For the contracts we have them sign,” said young Roger, overcoming his embarrassment. “They place their lives, their villages, everything they have, in the hands of the International Congo Society. And not one of them knows what he’s signing because none of them speaks French.”

  “If they knew French, they still wouldn’t understand those contracts.” The explorer laughed his frank, open laugh, one of his most amiable attributes. “I don’t even understand what they mean.”

  He was a strong, very short man, almost a midget, still young, with an athletic appearance, flashing gray eyes, thick mustache, and an irresistible personality. He always wore high boots, a pistol at his waist, and a light jacket with a good number of pockets. He laughed again, and the overseers of the expedition, who with Stanley and Roger drank coffee and smoked around the fire, laughed too, adulating their leader. But Roger did not laugh.

  “I do, though it’s true the rigmarole they’re written in seems intentional, so they won’t be understood,” he said, respectfully. “It comes down to something very simple. They give their lands to the AIC in exchange for promises of social assistance. They pledge to support the construction projects: roads, bridges, docks, factories. To supply the labor needed for the camps and public order and feed the officials and workers for as long as the work continues. The Society offers nothing in return. No salaries, no compensation. I always believed we were here for the good of the Africans, Mr. Stanley. I’d like you, whom I’ve admired since I was a boy, to give me reasons to go on believing it’s true. That these contracts are, in fact, for their good.”

  There was a long silence, broken by the crackling of the fire and occasional growls of night animals out hunting for food. It had stopped raining a while ago but the atmosphere was still humid and heavy, and it seemed that all around them everything was germinating, growing, becoming dense. Eighteen years later, in the disordered images the fever sent whirling around his head, Roger recalled the look, inquisitive, surprised, mocking at moments, with which Henry Morton Stanley inspected him.

  “Africa wasn’t made for the weak,” he said at last, as if talking to himself. “The things that worry you are signs of weakness. In the world we’re in, I mean. This isn’t the United States or England, as you must realize. In Africa the weak don’t survive. They’re finished off by bites, fevers, poisoned arrows, or the tsetse fly.”

  He was Welsh but must have lived a long time in the United States, because his English had North American tonalities, expressions, and turns of phrase.

  “All of this is for their good, of course it is,” Stanley added with a movement of his head toward the circle of conical huts in the hamlet on whose outskirts their camp was located. “Missionaries will come to lead them out of paganism and teach them that a Christian shouldn’t eat his neighbor. Physicians will vaccinate them against epidemics and cure them better than their witch doctors. Companies will give them work. Schools will teach them civilized languages. They’ll be taught how to dress, how to pray to the true God, how to speak like a Christian and not use those monkey dialects. Little by little their barbaric customs will be replaced by those of modern, educated people. If they knew what we’re doing for them, they’d kiss our feet. But mentally they are closer to the crocodile and the hippopotamus than to you or me. That’s why we decide what is good for them and have them sign those contracts. Their children and grandchildren will thank us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if in a little while they begin to worship Leopold the Second the way they worship their fetishes and hideous objects.”

  Where on the great river was that camp? He thought vaguely it was between Bolobo and Chumbiri and the tribe belonged to the Bateke. But he wasn’t sure. That data appeared in his diaries, if you could give that name to the hodgepodge of notes scattered in notebooks and on loose sheets of paper over the course of so many years. In any event, he remembered that conversation clearly, as well as his uneasiness when he lay down on his cot after the exchange with Henry Morton Stanley. Was that the night his personal holy trinity of the three Cs began to fall apart? Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Chr
istianity, civilization, and commerce. From the time he was a modest assistant accountant at the Elder Dempster Line in Liverpool, he had assumed there was a price to pay. It was inevitable that abuses would be committed. Among the colonizers there would be not only altruists such as Dr. Livingstone but abusive scoundrels as well, but in the final analysis, the benefits would far outweigh the harm. Life in Africa was showing him that things were not as clear as they had been in theory.