The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (16 page)

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.

Startled, he realized he was bellowing with laughter.

AMAZONIA

VIII

When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger arrived in Iquitos after a little more than six weeks of an exhausting voyage that transported him and the members of the commission from England to the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, the old infection that irritated his eyes had become worse, as had the attacks of arthritis and the general state of his health. But, faithful to his Stoic character (Herbert Ward called him “Senecan”), at no moment during the journey did he allow his ailments to be evident, making an effort instead to raise the spirits of his companions and help them endure their suffering. Colonel R. H. Bertie, a victim of dysentery, had to return to England when the ship docked at Madeira. The one who held up best was Louis Barnes, familiar with African agriculture since he had lived in Mozambique. The botanist Walter Folk, an expert in rubber, suffered in the heat and had neuralgia. Seymour Bell feared dehydration and always had a bottle of water in his hand, sipping from it constantly. Henry Fielgald had been in Amazonia the previous year, sent by Julio C. Arana’s company, and gave advice on how to protect against mosquitoes and the “evil temptations” of Iquitos.

There were certainly a good number of those. It seemed incredible in a city so small and unattractive—an immense muddy district with crude constructions of wood and adobe topped with palm leaves, a few buildings of noble materials with galvanized metal roofs, spacious mansions whose facades were decorated with tiles imported from Portugal—that there should be so great a proliferation of bars, taverns, brothels, and gambling houses, and that prostitutes of all races and colors should be on display so shamelessly from the earliest hours of the day on the high sidewalks. The countryside was superb. Iquitos was on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon, the Nanay River, surrounded by luxuriant vegetation, very tall trees, a permanent murmur from the groves, and river water that changed color as the sun moved across the sky. But few streets had sidewalks or asphalt, ditches ran beside them carrying excrement and garbage, there was a stench that at nightfall thickened to the point of nausea, and music from the bars, brothels, and centers of diversion never stopped, playing twenty-four hours a day. Stirs, the British consul, who welcomed them at the docks, indicated that Roger would stay in his house. The company had prepared a residence for the members of the commission. That same night, the prefect of Iquitos, Señor Rey Lama, gave a dinner in their honor.

It was a little after midday and Roger, saying that instead of having lunch he preferred to rest, withdrew to his bedroom. A simple room had been prepared for him that had indigenous fabrics with geometric drawings hanging on the walls and a small terrace from which a stretch of the river was visible. The street noise diminished here. He lay down without even removing his jacket or shoes and fell asleep immediately. He was filled with a peaceful feeling he hadn’t experienced for the month and a half of his journey.

He dreamed not of the four years of consular service he had just completed in Brazil—in Santos, Pará, and Rio de Janeiro—but the year and a half he had spent in Ireland between 1904 and 1905 following the months of heightened excitement and a demented rush of activity while the British government prepared the publication of his
Report
on the Congo, and the scandal that would make of him a hero and a pariah as praise from the liberal press and humanitarian organizations and diatribes from Leopold II’s hacks rained down on him at the same time. To escape the publicity while the Foreign Office decided his new assignment—after the
Report
it was unthinkable that he would set foot again in the Congo—Roger left for Ireland in search of anonymity. He did not pass unnoticed, but he was free of the invasive curiosity that in London left him no private life. Those months meant the rediscovery of his country, his immersion in an Ireland he had known about only in conversations, fantasies, and readings, very different from the one where he had lived as a child with his parents, or as an adolescent with his great-aunt and great-uncle and the rest of his paternal family, an Ireland that was not the tail and shadow of the British Empire, that fought to recover its language, traditions, and customs. “Roger, dear: you’ve become an Irish patriot,” his cousin Gee joked in a letter. “I’m making up for lost time,” he replied.

During those months he had made a long trek through Donegal and Galway, taking the pulse of the geography of his captive homeland, observing like a lover the austerity of her deserted fields and wild coast, chatting with her fishermen, fatalistic, unyielding men, independent of time, and her frugal, laconic farmers. He had met many Irish people “from the other side,” Catholics and some Protestants who, like Douglas Hyde, founder of the National Literary Society, promoted the renaissance of Irish culture, wanted to restore native names to towns and villages, resuscitate the ancient songs of Ireland, the old dances, and the traditional spinning and needlework of tweed and linen. When his appointment to the consulate in Lisbon was announced, he delayed his departure repeatedly, inventing pretexts regarding his health, in order to attend the first
Feis na nGleann
(Festival of the Glens) in Antrim, attended by close to three thousand people. During those days Roger felt his eyes grow wet when he heard the joyous melodies played by bagpipers and sung in chorus, or listened—not understanding what they were saying—to the storytellers recounting in Gaelic the ballads and legends submerged in the medieval night. Even a hurling match, that centuries-old sport, was held at the festival, where Roger met nationalist politicians and writers such as Sir Horace Plunkett, John Bulmer Hobson, and Stephen Gwynn, and was reunited with the women friends who, like Alice Stopford Green, had made the struggle for Irish culture their own: Ada McNeill, Margaret Dobbs, Alice Milligan, Agnes O’Farrelly, and Rose Maud Young.