The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (11 page)

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 officers 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.”

He spoke as if he had the fever and tremors of malaria.

“Fine,
mon père
,” Roger agreed. “But first sit down, let’s have coffee and something to eat.”

While they ate, Father Hutot explained to the consul that the Trappists at the mission in Coquilhatville had permission from the order to break the strict cloistered regime that rules elsewhere in order to give aid to the natives, “who need it so much in this land where Beelzebub seems to be winning the struggle with the Lord.”

Not only the monk’s voice trembled but also his eyes, his hands, his spirit. He blinked unceasingly, wore a coarse tunic that was stained and wet, and on his feet, covered with mud and scratches, were strapped sandals. Father Hutot had been in the Congo for some ten years. For the past eight he had traveled periodically to the villages in the region, climbed to the top of Bongandanga, and seen at close range a leopard that, instead of jumping him, moved off the path, waving its tail. He spoke indigenous languages and had gained the confidence of the natives, especially those from Walla, “those martyrs.”

They started out on a narrow trail between the branches of tall trees, intercepted from time to time by narrow streams. The song of invisible birds could be heard, and at times a flock of parrots flew screeching over their heads. Roger noticed that the monk walked through the jungle with assurance, not tripping, as if he had long experience of these treks through the undergrowth. Father Hutot explained to him what had happened in Walla. Since the village, already very reduced, could not deliver in full the last quota of food, rubber, and wood, or give over the number of laborers the authorities demanded, a detachment of thirty soldiers from the Force Publique, under the command of Lieutenant Tanville, came from the garrison at Coquilhatville. When they saw them approach, the entire village fled to the forest. But the interpreters followed and assured them they could return. Nothing would happen to them, Lieutenant Tanville wanted only to explain the new directives and negotiate with the village. The chief ordered them to return. As soon as they did, the soldiers fell on them. Men and women were tied to the trees and whipped. A pregnant woman who tried to move away to urinate was shot to death by a soldier, who believed she was fleeing. Another ten women were taken to the
maison d’otages
in Coquilhatville as hostages. Lieutenant Tanville gave Walla a week to fulfill its quota or those ten women would be shot and the village burned.

When Father Hutot arrived in Walla a few days later, he encountered a hideous sight. In order to fulfill the quotas they owed, the families in the village had sold their sons and daughters, and two of the men their wives, to traveling merchants who practiced the slave trade behind the backs of the authorities. The Trappist believed the children and women sold numbered at least eight, but perhaps there were more. The natives were terrified. They had gone to buy rubber and food to satisfy the debt but weren’t sure the money from the sale would be enough.

“Can you believe things like that happen in this world, Consul?”

“Yes,
mon père.
Now I believe everything evil and terrible that people tell me. If I’ve learned anything in the Congo it’s that there’s no bloodthirsty animal worse than the human being.”

I didn’t see anyone cry in Walla
, Roger would think afterward. And he didn’t hear anyone complain. The village seemed inhabited by automatons, ghostly beings who walked back and forth among the thirty or so huts made of wooden sticks with conical roofs of palm leaves, disoriented, not knowing where to go, having forgotten who they were, where they were, as if a curse had fallen on the village, transforming its inhabitants into phantoms. But phantoms with backs and buttocks covered in fresh scars, some with traces of blood as if the wounds were still open.

With the help of Father Hutot, who spoke the tribe’s language fluently, Roger carried out his work. He questioned each and every one of the villagers, listening to them repeat what he had already heard and would often hear afterward. Here too, in Walla, he was surprised that none of those poor creatures complained about the main thing: With what right had the foreigners come to invade, exploit, and mistreat them? They took into consideration only the immediate problem: the quotas. They were excessive, there was no human force that could gather so much rubber, so much food, give up so many laborers. They didn’t even complain about the beatings and the hostages. They asked only that their quotas be lowered a little so they could fulfill them and in this way keep the authorities happy with the people of Walla.

Roger spent the night in the village. The following day, his notebooks filled with notes and testimonies, he said goodbye to Father Hutot. He had decided to change his planned trajectory. He returned to Lake Mantumba, boarded the
Henry Reed
, and headed for Coquilhatville. It was a large village, with irregular dirt streets, dwellings scattered among groves of palm trees, and small cultivated fields. As soon as he disembarked, he went to the garrison of the Force Publique, a vast space of rough buildings and a stockade of yellow slats.

Lieutenant Tanville had gone out on an assignment, but Roger was received by Captain Marcel Junieux, the head of the garrison and the man responsible for all the stations and posts of the Force Publique in the region. He was in his forties, tall, slim, muscular, his skin bronzed by the sun and his hair, already gray, cut close to the scalp. He had a little medal of the Virgin hanging around his neck and the tattoo of a small animal on his forearm. He led Roger to a crude office that had some banners and a photograph of Leopold II in parade uniform on the walls. He offered him a cup of coffee and had him sit at a small worktable covered with notebooks, regulations, maps, and pencils, on a very fragile chair that seemed about to collapse at each movement Roger made. The captain had spent his childhood in England, where his father had a business, and spoke good English. He was a career officer who had volunteered to come to the Congo five years earlier “to serve my country, Consul.” He said this with acid irony.

He was about to be promoted and return to the mother country. He listened to Roger without once interrupting him, very serious and, it seemed, deeply focused on what he was hearing. His grave, impenetrable expression did not alter at any detail. Roger was precise and meticulous. He made very clear what he had been told and what he had seen with his own eyes: the scarred backs and buttocks, the testimonies of those who had sold their children to fulfill the quotas they hadn’t been able to satisfy. He explained that His Majesty’s government would be informed of these horrors, but he also believed it was his duty, in the name of the government he represented, to lodge his protest against the Force Publique, which was responsible for abuses as outrageous as those committed in Walla. He was an eyewitness to the fact that the village had been turned into a small hell. When he finished speaking, Captain Junieux’s face did not change. He waited some time, in silence. Finally, moving his head slightly, he said quietly,

“As you no doubt know, Consul, we, I mean the Force Publique, do not issue the laws. We simply see that they are carried out.”