The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read online

  “And if you want to know why there are so many Congolese with bandages on their hands and private parts, I can explain that to you as well,” Lily de Hailes added defiantly. “Because the soldiers of the Force Publique cut off their hands and penises or crush them with machetes. Don’t forget to put that in your report. They’re things that aren’t usually said in Europe when they talk about the Congo.”

  That afternoon, after spending several hours talking through interpreters with the wounded and sick in the Bolobo hospital, Roger could not eat supper. He felt guilty toward the ministers in the mission, among them Dr. de Hailes, who had roasted a chicken in his honor. He excused himself, saying he didn’t feel well. He was certain that if he tasted even a single mouthful, he would vomit on his hosts.

  “If what you have seen has upset you, perhaps it isn’t prudent for you to interview Captain Massard,” advised the head of the mission. “Listening to him is a good experience, I would say, for strong stomachs.”

  “That’s why I’ve come to the Middle Congo, my friends.”

  Captain Pierre Massard, of the Force Publique, was not stationed in Bolobo but in Mbongo, where there was a garrison and training camp for the Africans who would be soldiers in the force charged with maintaining order and security. He was on an inspection tour and had set up a small campaign tent near the mission. The ministers invited him to speak with the consul, warning Roger that the officer was famous for his irascible character. The natives had nicknamed him “Malu Malu,” and one of the sinister deeds attributed to him was having killed three intractable Africans, whom he had placed in a row, with a single shot. It wasn’t prudent to provoke him, because he was capable of anything.

  He was a powerful, rather short man, with a square face, hair cut very close, nicotine-stained teeth, and an icy little smile. He had small, somewhat slanted eyes, and a high-pitched, almost feminine voice. The ministers had prepared a table with cassava pastries and mango juice. They didn’t drink alcohol but had no objection to Casement bringing a bottle of brandy and another of claret from the Henry Reed. The captain ceremoniously shook hands with everyone and greeted Roger by making a baroque bow, calling him “son excellence, Monsieur le Consul.” They toasted, drank, and lit cigarettes.

  “If you’ll permit me, Captain Massard, I’d like to ask you a question,” said Roger.

  “How well you speak French, Monsieur le Consul. Where did you learn it?”

  “I began to study it when I was young, in Britain. But above all here, in the Congo, where I’ve been for many years. I imagine I speak it with a Belgian accent.”

  “Ask me all the questions you wish,” said Massard, taking another drink. “Your brandy is excellent, by the way.”

  The four Baptist ministers were there, still and silent, as if petrified. They were North Americans, two young men and two old. Dr. de Hailes had gone to the hospital. Night began to fall and the buzz of nocturnal insects could already be heard. To chase away mosquitoes, they had lit a fire that crackled gently and smoked at times.

  “I’m going to tell you with utter frankness, Captain Massard,” said Roger, not raising his voice, very slowly. “I think the crushed hands and cut-off penises that I’ve seen in the Bolobo hospital are unacceptable savagery.”

  “They are, of course they are,” the officer admitted immediately, with an expression of disgust. “And something worse than that, Monsieur le Consul: a waste. Those mutilated men won’t be able to work any more, or they’ll do it badly, and their yield will be minimal. With the lack of labor we have here, it’s a real crime. Bring me the soldiers who cut off those hands and penises and I’ll thrash their backs until there’s no blood left in their veins.”

  He sighed, overwhelmed by the degrees of imbecility the world suffered from. He took another sip of brandy and inhaled his cigarette deeply.

  “Do the laws or regulations permit the mutilation of indigenous people?” asked Roger.

  Captain Massard guffawed, and when he laughed his square face rounded and comic dimples appeared.

  “They prohibit it categorically,” he declared, waving away something in the air. “Make those two-legged animals understand what laws and regulations are. Don’t you know them? If you’ve spent so many years in the Congo, you must. It’s easier to make a hyena or a tick understand things than a Congolese.”

  He laughed again, but then immediately became enraged. Now his expression was hard and his slanted little eyes had almost disappeared beneath swollen lids.

  “I’m going to explain to you what happens, and then you’ll understand,” he added, sighing, fatigued in advance at having to explain things as obvious as the world being round. “Everything stems from a very simple concern,” he said, waving away his winged enemy with greater fury. “The Force Publique cannot waste ammunition. We cannot permit the soldiers to squander the bullets we distribute killing monkeys, snakes, and other revolting animals they like to stick in their bellies, sometimes raw. During training they are taught that ammunition can only be used in self-defense, when officers order them to. But it’s hard for these blacks to follow orders, no matter how many chicote lashes they receive. That’s why the decree was issued. Do you understand, Monsieur le Consul?”

  “No, I don’t understand, Captain,” said Roger. “What decree is that?”

  “That each time they fire they cut off the hand or penis of the man they shot,” the captain explained. “To confirm that bullets are not being wasted on hunting. A sensible way to avoid wasting ammunition, isn’t that so?”

  He sighed again and took another drink of brandy. He spat into the emptiness.

  “But no, that isn’t what happened,” the captain complained immediately, enraged again. “Because these shits found a way to get around the decree. Can you guess how?”

  “I have no idea,” said Roger.

  “Very simple. By cutting off the hands and penises of the living to make us think they’ve fired at people when they’ve shot monkeys, snakes, and the other filth they eat. Do you understand now why all those poor devils are there in the hospital without hands and pricks?”

  He fell silent for a long while and drank the rest of the brandy in his glass. He seemed to become sad and even pouted.

  “We do what we can, Monsieur le Consul,” Captain Massard added sorrowfully. “It’s not at all easy, I assure you. Because in addition to being stupid, the savages are born falsifiers. They lie, deceive, lack feelings and principles. Not even fear opens their minds. I assure you that the punishments in the Force Publique for those who cut off the hands and pricks of the living to deceive and continue to hunt with ammunition given to them by the state are very severe. Visit our posts and see for yourself, Monsieur le Consul.”

  The conversation with Captain Massard lasted as long as the fire throwing off sparks at their feet, two hours at least. The officer and the consul had drunk the brandy and the claret. They were somewhat tipsy, but Roger was still lucid. Months or years later he could have recounted in detail the brusque remarks and confessions he heard and the way Captain Pierre Massard’s square face became congested with alcohol. In the following weeks he would have many other conversations with officers of the Force Publique, Belgian, Italian, French, and German, and would hear terrible things from their mouths, but what would always stand out in his memory as the most thought-provoking, a symbol of Congolese reality, was the chat that night in Bolobo with Captain Massard. After a certain point the officer became sentimental. He confessed to Roger how much he missed his wife. He hadn’t seen her for two years and received few letters from her. Perhaps she had stopped loving him. Perhaps she had taken a lover. It wasn’t surprising. It happened to many officers and functionaries who, to serve Belgium and His Majesty the king, buried themselves in this hell, to contract diseases, be bitten by snakes, live without the most basic comforts. And for what? To earn miserable salaries that barely allowed them to save. And afterward, in Belgium, would anyone thank them for their sacrifice? On the contrary, in the
mother country there was an unyielding prejudice against “colonials.” The officers and functionaries who returned from the colony were discriminated against, kept at a distance, as if, after spending so much time with savages, they had become savages too.

  When Captain Pierre Massard drifted to the topic of sex, Roger felt an anticipatory disgust and tried to say good night. But by now the officer was drunk, and in order not to offend him or have an altercation with him, he had to stay. In the meantime, enduring his nausea, he listened to him, telling himself he wasn’t in Bolobo to dispense justice but to investigate and accumulate information. The more exact and complete his report, the more effective his contribution to the struggle against the institutionalized evil the Congo had become. Captain Massard felt compassion for those young lieutenants or noncommissioned officers from the Belgian army who came filled with illusions to teach these poor devils to be soldiers. And what about their sex lives? They had to leave behind in Europe their fiancées, wives, and mistresses. And what about here? Not even prostitutes worthy of the name in these godforsaken wastelands. Only some disgusting black women covered with insects, and you had to be very drunk to fuck them, running the risk of catching crabs, the clap, or a chancre. It was hard for him, for example. He couldn’t perform, nom de Dieu! It had never happened to him in Europe. Him, Pierre Massard, impotent in bed! It wasn’t even a good idea to get a blow job, because with those teeth so many black women were in the habit of filing down, they could give you a sudden bite and castrate you.

  He grabbed his fly and began to laugh, making an obscene face. Taking advantage of the fact that Massard was still having a good time, Roger stood.

  “I must go, Captain. I have to leave very early tomorrow and I’d like to rest a little.”

  The captain shook his hand in a mechanical way but continued speaking, not getting up from his seat, his voice faint and his eyes glassy. When Roger walked away, he heard him at his back, muttering that choosing a military career had been the great mistake of his life, and for the rest of his life he would keep paying for it.

  He set sail the next morning in the Henry Reed on his way to Lukolela. He spent three days there, speaking day and night with all kinds of people: functionaries, colonists, overseers, natives. Then he advanced to Ikoko, where he entered Lake Mantumba. Near it he found that enormous tract of land called the Domaine de la Couronne. Around it the principal private rubber companies operated, the Lulonga Company, the ABIR Company, and the Société Anver-soise du Commerce au Congo, which had vast concessions throughout the region. He visited dozens of villages, some on the shores of the immense lake and others in the interior. To reach these it was necessary to shift to small canoes powered by oars or poles and walk for hours in dense undergrowth that was dark and damp, through which the natives cut a path with machetes and where he was often obliged to wade in water up to his waist over flooded terrain and pestilential quagmires amid clouds of mosquitoes and the silent shapes of bats. For all these weeks he resisted fatigue, natural difficulties, and inclement weather without flagging, in a feverish spiritual state, as if bewitched, because each day, each hour, he seemed to be sinking into deeper layers of suffering and evil. Would the hell Dante described in his Commedia be like this? He hadn’t read the book and swore he would as soon as he could get his hands on a copy.

  The indigenous people, who at the beginning of the trip ran away as soon as they saw the Henry Reed approach, believing the steamboat carried soldiers, soon began to come out to meet it and send emissaries so that he would visit their villages. Word had spread among the natives that the British consul was traveling the region to listen to their complaints and requests, and then they went to him with testimonies and stories, each worse than the other. They believed he had the power to straighten everything that was crooked in the Congo. He explained the situation to them in vain. He had no power at all. He would report on these injustices and crimes and Great Britain and her allies would demand that the Belgian government put an end to the abuses and punish the torturers and criminals. That was all he could do. Did they understand? He wasn’t even sure they were listening. They felt so pressed to speak, to recount the things that had happened to them, that they paid him no attention. They spoke in a rush, choking with despair and rage. The interpreters had to interrupt them, pleading with them to speak more slowly so they could do their job.

  Roger listened, taking notes. Then, for nights on end he wrote on his cards and in his notebooks what he had heard so none of it would be lost. He barely ate. He was so tormented by the fear that all those papers he had scrawled on might be lost that he didn’t know where to hide them or what precautions to take. He chose to carry them with him, on the shoulders of a porter who had been ordered never to leave his side.

  He hardly slept, and when fatigue overwhelmed him, nightmares attacked, moving him from fear to stunned bewilderment, from satanic visions to a state of desolation and sadness in which everything lost its meaning and reason for being: his family, friends, ideas, country, feelings, and work. At those moments he longed more than ever for Herbert Ward and his infectious enthusiasm for all of life’s manifestations, an optimistic joy that nothing and no one could crush.

  Afterward, when the journey ended and he wrote his report and left the Congo, and his twenty years in Africa were only a memory, Roger often said to himself that if there was a single word at the root of all the horrible things happening here, that word was greed. Greed for the black gold found in abundance in the Congolese jungles, to the misfortune of their people. That wealth was the curse that had befallen those unfortunates, and if things continued in the same way, it would cause them to disappear from the face of the earth. He reached this conclusion during those three months and ten days: if the rubber was not consumed first, the Congolese would be the ones consumed by a system that was annihilating them by the hundreds of thousands.

  During those weeks, after he entered the waters of Lake Mantumba, memories would be mixed like shuffled cards. If he had not kept a detailed record of dates, places, testimonies, and observations in his notebooks, all of it would be scrambled and out of order in his memory. He would close his eyes and in a dizzying whirlwind those ebony bodies would appear and reappear with reddish scars like snakes slicing across their backs, buttocks, and legs, the stumps of children and old people whose arms had been cut off, the emaciated, cadaverous faces that seemed to have had the life, fat, and muscles drained from them, leaving only the skin, the skull, and the fixed expression or grimace expressing, more than pain, an infinite stupefaction at everything they were suffering. And it was always the same, the same acts repeated over and over again in all the villages and settlements where Roger set foot with his notebooks, pencils, and camera.

  The point of departure was simple and clear. Certain precise obligations had been fixed for each village: delivering weekly or semimonthly quotas of food—cassava, fowl, antelope meat, wild pigs, goats, or ducks—to feed the garrison of the Force Publique and the laborers who opened roads, installed telegraph poles, and constructed piers and storehouses. Moreover, the village had to deliver a fixed quantity of rubber harvested in baskets woven of vines by the natives themselves. The punishments for not fulfilling these obligations varied. For delivering less than the established quantities of foodstuffs or rubber, the penalty was whipping with the chicote, never less than twenty and sometimes as many as fifty or one hundred lashes. Many of those punished bled to death. The indigenous people who fled—very few of them—sacrificed their families because their wives were kept as hostages in the maisons d’otages that the Force Publique had in all its garrisons. There, the wives of fugitives were whipped, condemned to the torments of hunger and thirst, and at times subjected to tortures as evil-minded as being forced to eat their own or their guards’ excrement.

  Not even the orders issued by the colonial power—both private companies and the king’s holdings—were respected. Everywhere the system was violated and made worse by the soldiers and office
rs charged with making it function, because in each village the military men and government agents increased the quotas in order to keep for themselves a part of the food and some baskets of rubber, reselling them in small transactions.

  In all the villages Roger visited, the complaints of the chiefs were identical: if all the men dedicated themselves to harvesting rubber, how could they go out to hunt and cultivate cassava and other foods to feed the authorities, the bosses, the guards, and the laborers? Besides, the rubber trees were giving out, which obliged the harvesters to go deeper and deeper into unknown, inhospitable regions where many had been attacked by leopards, lions, and snakes. It wasn’t possible to satisfy all these demands no matter how they tried.

  On September 1, 1903, Roger turned thirty-nine years old. They were navigating the Lopori River. The night before they had left the settlement of Isi Isulo in the hills surrounding Bongandanga Mountain. This birthday would remain permanently etched in his memory, as if on that day God or perhaps the devil wanted to prove there were no limits in matters of human cruelty, that it was always possible to go further in devising ways to inflict torment on another human being.

  The day dawned cloudy with the threat of a storm, but the rain didn’t come and all morning the atmosphere was charged with electricity. Roger was about to have breakfast when Father Hutot, a Trappist monk from the mission the order had in the area of Coquilhatville, came to the improvised dock where the Henry Reed was anchored. He was tall and thin, like an El Greco figure, with a long gray beard and eyes where something stirred that could have been anger, fright, astonishment, or all three at once.

  “I know what you’re doing in these lands, Consul,” he said, extending a skeletal hand to Roger. He spoke French rushed by an imperative urgency. “I beg you to accompany me to the village of Walla. It’s only an hour or an hour and a half from here. You have to see it with your own eyes.”