The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (12 page)

His gaze was clear and direct, with no trace of discomfort or irritation.

“I know the laws and regulations that govern the Congo Free State, Captain. Nothing in them authorizes you to mutilate the natives, to whip them until they bleed to death, to keep the women hostage so their husbands don’t run away, to extort the villages to the extreme that mothers have to sell their children to deliver the quotas of food and rubber you demand of them.”

“We?” Captain Junieux exaggerated his surprise. He shook his head and as he moved, the little tattooed animal moved. “We demand nothing of anyone. We receive orders and carry them out, that’s all. The Force Publique does not set the quotas, Mr. Casement. The political authorities and the directors of the concessionaire companies set them. We are the executors of a policy in which we have not intervened in the slightest. No one ever asked for our opinion. If they had, perhaps things would go better.”

He stopped speaking and seemed distracted for a moment. Through the large windows with metal screens, Roger saw a rectangular treeless clearing where a formation of African soldiers were marching, wearing drill trousers, theirs torsos and feet bare. They changed direction at the command of a sergeant major wearing boots, a uniform shirt, and a kepi.

“I’ll investigate. If Lieutenant Tanville has committed or facilitated extortion, he will be punished,” said the captain. “The soldiers, too, of course, if they were excessive in the use of the
chicote
. This is all I can promise you. The rest is beyond my authority; it is a legal question. Changing this system is not the task of the military but of judges and politicians. Of the Supreme Government. You know that too, I imagine.”

Suddenly a slight inflection of discouragement appeared in his voice.

“There’s nothing I’d like better than for the system to change. I’m disgusted too by what happens here. What we’re obliged to do offends my principles.” He touched the medal around his neck. “My faith. I’m a very Catholic man. Over there, in Europe, I always tried to act according to my beliefs. That isn’t possible here in the Congo, Consul. That’s the sad truth. That’s why I’m very happy to return to Belgium. I won’t set foot in Africa again, I assure you.”

Captain Junieux got up from his table and walked to one of the windows. Turning his back on the consul, he was silent for a long time, observing the recruits who never learned the rhythm of the march, who tripped, whose lines in their formation were crooked.

“If that’s the case, you could do something to put an end to these crimes,” Roger murmured. “This isn’t why we Europeans came to Africa.”

“Ah, isn’t it?” Captain Junieux turned to look at him and the consul saw that the officer had paled somewhat. “What have we come for, then? I know: to bring civilization, Christianity, and free commerce. Do you still believe that, Mr. Casement?”

“Not anymore,” Roger replied immediately. “Though I did believe it before. With all my heart. I believed it for many years, with all the ingenuousness of the idealistic boy I once was. That Europe came to Africa to save lives and souls, to civilize the savages. Now I know I was wrong.”

Captain Junieux’s expression changed, and it seemed to Roger that suddenly the officer’s face had traded the hieratic mask for a more human one that even looked at him with the pitying sympathy idiots deserve.

“I’m trying to redeem that sin of my youth, Captain. That’s why I’ve come to Coquilhatville. That’s why I’m documenting, as fully as I can, the abuses committed here in the name of so-called civilization.”

“I wish you success, Consul.” Captain Junieux mocked him with a smile. “But if you’ll allow me to speak frankly, I’m afraid you won’t have any. There’s no human power that can change this system. It’s too late for that.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to visit the jail and the
maison d’otages
where you have the women brought here from Walla,” said Roger, abruptly changing the topic.

“You can visit anything you like,” the officer agreed. “Make yourself at home. But permit me to remind you again of what I said. We aren’t the ones who invented the Congo Free State. We only make it function. We’re victims too.”

The jail was a hut of wood and brick, with no windows and a single entrance, guarded by two native soldiers with shotguns. There were a dozen half-naked men, some very old, lying on the ground. What he found most shocking wasn’t the abject or inexpressive faces of those silent skeletons whose eyes followed him back and forth as he walked around the hut, but the stench of urine and excrement.

“We’ve tried to teach them to take care of their business in those buckets.” He read the captain’s mind as he pointed at a receptacle. “But they’re not used to that. They prefer the ground. They don’t care about the stink. It’s their problem. Maybe they don’t smell it.”

The
maison d’otages
was smaller but the spectacle was more dramatic because it was so crowded Roger could barely circulate among those packed-together, half-naked bodies. The space was so tight that many women could not sit or lie down but had to remain standing.

“This is exceptional,” said Captain Junieux, gesturing. “There are never this many. Tonight, so they can sleep, we’ll move half of them to one of the soldiers’ barracks.”

Here, too, the stink of urine and excrement was compelling. Some women were very young, almost girls. They all had the same gaze—lost, somnambulistic, beyond life—which Roger would see in so many Congolese women during this journey. One of the hostages had a newborn in her arms, so still it seemed dead.

“What criterion do you follow for letting them go?” the consul asked.

“I don’t decide that, sir, a magistrate does. There are three in Coquilhatville. There is only one criterion: when the husbands turn in the quotas they’re supposed to, they can take their wives away.”

“And if they don’t?”

The captain shrugged.

“Some manage to escape,” he said, not looking at him and lowering his voice. “The soldiers take others and make them their wives. Those are the luckiest. Some go mad and kill themselves. Others die of sorrow, rage, and hunger. As you’ve seen, they have almost nothing to eat. That isn’t our fault either. I don’t receive enough supplies to feed the soldiers. Even less for the prisoners. Sometimes we take up small collections among the officers to improve the rations. That’s how things are. I’m the first to regret it isn’t different. If you succeed in improving this, the Force Publique will thank you.”

Roger went to visit the three Belgian magistrates in Coquilhatville, but only one received him. The other two invented pretexts for avoiding him. But Maître Duval, a plump, self-satisfied man in his fifties who, in spite of the tropical heat, wore a vest, false shirt cuffs, and a frock coat with a watch chain, led him to his stripped-down office and offered him a cup of tea. He listened politely, sweating profusely. He wiped his face from time to time with a handkerchief that was already wet. At times he made disapproving movements of his head and wore an afflicted expression because of what the consul was saying. When Roger finished, he asked him to detail everything in writing. In that way he would be able to file with the court of which he formed part a requisitory to open a formal investigation into these lamentable episodes. Though perhaps, Maître Duval rectified, with a reflective finger on his chin, it would be preferable if the consul would file that report with the Superior Court, established now in Leopoldville. Because it was a higher, more influential court, it could act more efficiently throughout the colony. Not only remedying this state of things, but at the same time indemnifying with economic compensation the families of the victims and the victims themselves. Roger told him he would. He said goodbye, convinced that Maître Duval would not lift a finger and neither would the Superior Court in Leopoldville. But even so, he would file the brief.

At dusk, when he was about to leave, a native came to tell him the monks at the Trappist mission wanted to see him. There he saw Father Hutot again. The monks—there were half a dozen—wanted to ask him to secretly carry away on his steamboat a handful of fugitives they had been hiding in the monastery for some days. They were all from the village of Bonginda, up the Congo River, where, on account of not fulfilling their quotas of rubber, the Force Publique had carried out a punishing action as severe as the one in Walla.

The Trappist mission in Coquilhatville was a large two-story house of clay, stones, and wood, which looked like a small fort from the outside. The windows were closed up. The abbot, Dom Jesualdo, of Portuguese origin, was very old, as were another two monks, emaciated and almost lost in their white tunics, with black scapulars and crude leather belts. Only the oldest were monks, the others were lay brothers. All of them, like Father Hutot, displayed the semiskeletal thinness that was like the emblem of the Trappists here. Inside, the building was bright, for only the chapel, the refectory, and the monks’ dormitory had roofs. There was a garden, an orchard, a yard with fowl, a cemetery, and a kitchen with a large stove.

“What crime have these people committed that you ask me to take them away in secret from the authorities?”

“Being poor, Consul,” said Dom Jesualdo, sorrowfully. “You know that very well. You’ve just seen in Walla what it means to be poor, humble, and Congolese.”

Roger agreed. Surely it was an act of mercy to give the help the Trappists had requested. But he hesitated. As a diplomat, secretly spiriting away fugitives from justice, even if persecuted for unjust reasons, was risky. It could compromise Great Britain and completely taint the informative mission he was carrying out for the Foreign Office.

“May I see and speak to them?”

Dom Jesualdo agreed. Father Hutot withdrew and returned with the group almost immediately. There were seven, all male, including three boys. They all had their left hands cut off or maimed by blows from a rifle butt, and traces of lashes from a
chicote
on their chests and backs. The head of the group was named Mansunda and wore a crest of feathers and necklaces of animal teeth; his face displayed old scars from the initiation rites of his tribe. Father Hutot acted as interpreter. Twice in a row the village of Bonginda had not fulfilled its deliveries of rubber—the trees in the area had run out of latex—to the emissaries of the Lulonga Company, the concessionary in the region. Then the African guards brought to the village by the Force Publique began to whip them and cut off hands and feet. There was an outburst of rage and the village rebelled and killed a guard while the others managed to run away. A few days later Bonginda was occupied by a column of the Force Publique that set fire to all the houses, killed a good number of the residents, men and women, burning some inside their huts and taking the rest to the jail in Coquilhatville and the
maison d’otages
. Chief Mansunda believed they were the only ones who had escaped, thanks to the Trappists. If the Force Publique captured them they would be victims of extreme punishment, like all the rest, because throughout the Congo rebellion by the natives was always punished by the extermination of the entire community.

“Fine,
mon père
,” said Roger. “I’ll take them with me on the
Henry Reed
until they’re away from here. But only to the closest French shore.”

“God will reward you, Consul,” said Father Hutot.

“I don’t know,
mon père
,” replied the consul. “In this case you and I are breaking the law.”

“Man’s law,” the Trappist corrected him. “We are violating it, and rightly so, in order to be faithful to God’s law.”

Roger shared the monks’ frugal vegetarian supper. He spoke with them for a long time. Dom Jesualdo joked that in his honor the Trappists were violating the rule of silence that governed the order. The monks and lay brothers seemed oppressed and defeated by this country, just as he was. How could it have come to this, he reflected aloud with them. And he told them that nineteen years earlier he had come to Africa filled with enthusiasm, convinced the colonial enterprise was going to bring a decent life to the Africans. How was it possible that colonization had become this horrible plundering, this dizzying cruelty, with people who called themselves Christians torturing, mutilating, killing defenseless creatures and subjecting them, even children and the old, to atrocious cruelties? Hadn’t we Europeans come here to put an end to the slave trade and bring the religion of charity and justice? Because what occurred here was even worse than the slave trade, wasn’t it?

The monks let him unburden himself, not saying a word. Was it because, in spite of what the abbot said, they didn’t want to break the rule of silence? No: they were as confused and wounded by the Congo as he was.

“God’s ways are inscrutable to poor sinners like us, Consul,” Dom Jesualdo said with a sigh. “The important thing is not to fall into despair. Not to lose faith. That there are men here like you encourages us, returns hope to us. We wish you success in your mission. We will pray that God permits you to do something for these unfortunate people.”

The seven fugitives boarded the
Henry Reed
at dawn the next day, at a bend in the river, when the steamboat was already some distance from Coquilhatville. For the three days they were with him, Roger was tense and anxious. He had given the crew a vague explanation to justify the presence of the seven mutilated natives and thought the men distrusted and looked with suspicion at the group, with whom they had no communication. At Irebu, the
Henry Reed
approached the French side of the Congo River and that night, while the crew slept, seven silent silhouettes slipped away and disappeared into the undergrowth on the bank. Afterward no one asked the consul what had become of them.

At this point in his journey, Roger began to feel ill. Not only morally and psychologically, but his body, too, was showing the effects of lack of sleep, insect bites, excessive physical effort, and perhaps, above all, his state of mind as rage alternated with demoralization, the desire to complete his work with the premonition that his report would do no good because in London the bureaucrats in the Foreign Office and the politicians in His Majesty’s service would decide it was imprudent to antagonize an ally like Leopold II, that publishing a report with such serious accusations would have detrimental consequences for Great Britain, since it would be equivalent to pushing Belgium into the arms of Germany. Weren’t the interests of the Empire more important than the plaintive laments of some half-naked savages who worshiped felines and serpents and were cannibals?