The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (21 page)

He sighed again and breathed with difficulty.

“Can’t you do anything with the authorities?”

“We could, in principle,” said Father Urrutia. “Slavery was abolished in Peru more than half a century ago. We could have recourse to the police and the judges. But all of them also have bought their little servants. Besides, what would the authorities do with the girls they rescued? Keep them or sell them, of course. And not always to families. Sometimes to brothels for what you can imagine.”

“Is there no way to return them to their tribes?”

“The tribes around here are almost nonexistent by now. The parents were abducted and driven to the rubber plantations. There’s no place to take them. Why rescue those poor creatures, and for what? In these circumstances, perhaps it’s a lesser evil for them to stay in families. Some people treat them well, are fond of them. Does that seem monstrous to you?”

“Monstrous,” Roger repeated.

“It does to me, to us, as well,” said Father Urrutia. “We spend hours at the mission, racking our brains. What’s the solution? We can’t find it. We’ve taken steps in Rome to see if nuns can come and open a small school here for the girls. At least they’d receive some instruction. But will the families agree to send them to school? Very few, in any case. They consider them animals.”

He sighed again. He had spoken with so much bitterness that Roger, infected by the priest’s dejection, wanted to return to the British consul’s house. He stood.

“You can do something, Señor Casement,” said Father Urrutia in farewell, shaking his hand. “What’s happened is a kind of miracle. I mean, the denunciations, the scandal in Europe. The coming of this commission to Loreto. If anyone can help these poor people, it is all of you. I’ll pray for you to come back from Putumayo safe and sound.”

Roger walked back very slowly, not looking at what was going on in the bars and brothels where he could hear voices, singing, strumming guitars. He thought about those children torn away from their tribes, separated from their families, packed into the bilge of a launch, brought to Iquitos, sold for twenty or thirty
soles
to a family where they would spend their lives sweeping, scrubbing, cooking, cleaning toilets, washing dirty clothes, insulted, hit, and at times raped by their owner or the sons of the owner. The same old story. The never-ending story.

IX

When the cell door opened and he saw in the doorway the bulky shape of the sheriff, Roger thought he had a visitor—Gee or Alice, perhaps—but the jailer, instead of indicating that he should get to his feet and follow him to the visitors’ room, stood looking at him in a strange way, not saying anything.
They turned down the petition
, Roger thought. He remained lying on his cot, certain that if he stood the trembling in his legs would make him collapse.

“You still want a shower?” the cold, slow voice of the sheriff asked.

My last wish
, he thought.
After the wash, the hangman.

“This goes against the rules,” the sheriff murmured with some emotion. “But today’s the first anniversary of the death of my son in France. I want to offer an act of compassion to his memory.”

“I thank you,” said Roger, standing. What had gotten into the sheriff? When had he ever shown him any kindnesses?

It seemed as if the blood in his veins, frozen when he saw the jailer appear at the door of his cell, began to circulate through his body again. He went out to the long, soot-stained hall and followed the fat jailer to the bathroom, a dark area that had a row of chipped toilets along one wall, a line of showers along the opposite wall, and some unpainted concrete receptacles with rusted spouts that poured out the water. The sheriff remained standing at the entrance while Roger undressed, hung his blue uniform and convict’s cap on a nail in the wall, and went into the shower. The stream of water made him shiver from head to toe and, at the same time, produced a feeling of joy and gratitude. He closed his eyes, and, before soaping himself with the cake he had taken from one of the rubber boxes hanging on the wall, rubbed his arms and legs, feeling the cold water slide along his body. He was happy and exalted. With the stream of water not only did the dirt that had accumulated on his body for so many days disappear, but preoccupations, distress, and remorse as well. He soaped and rinsed himself for a long while until the sheriff indicated from a distance, with a clap of his hands, that he should hurry. Roger dried with the same clothing he put on. He did not have a comb and smoothed his hair with his hands.

“You have no idea how grateful I am for this wash, Sheriff,” he said as they returned to his cell. “It has given me back life and health.”

The jailer replied with an unintelligible murmur.

When he lay down on his cot again, Roger attempted to go back to reading Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
, but he couldn’t concentrate and put the book back on the floor.

He thought about Captain Robert Monteith, his assistant and friend for the last six months he spent in Germany. A magnificent man! Loyal, efficient, and heroic. His companion in travel and travails on the
U-19
German submarine that brought them, along with Sergeant Daniel Julian Bailey, alias Julian Beverly, to the coast of Kerry, where the three almost drowned because they didn’t know how to row. Didn’t know how to row! That’s how things were: foolish little things could become mixed with great events and wreck them. He recalled the gray, rainy dawn, rough sea, and heavy mist on Good Friday, April 21, 1916, and the three of them in the unsteady boat with three oars where the German submarine had left them before disappearing into the fog. “Good luck,” Captain Raimund Weisbach shouted by way of farewell. Again he had the awful feeling of impotence, trying to control the boat pitching in the violent waves, and the inability of three makeshift rowers to head it toward the coast whose location none of them knew. The boat spun around, went up and down, leaped, traced circles with a variable radius, and since none of the three managed to maneuver past them, the waves, striking the sides of the boat, made it shudder so much they thought that at any moment it might capsize. And in fact, it did capsize. For a few minutes the three men were on the point of drowning. They splashed and swallowed salt water until they succeeded in righting the boat and, helping one another, climbed back in. Roger recalled the valiant Monteith, his hand infected by the accident he’d had in Germany, in the port of Heligoland, trying to learn to drive a motor launch. They moored there to change submarines because the
U-2
, on which they sailed from Wilhelmshaven, had a flaw. The wound had tormented him during the entire week’s voyage between Heligoland and Tralee Bay. Roger, who made the crossing suffering atrocious seasickness and vomiting, hardly eating or getting off his narrow bunk, recalled Monteith’s stoic patience as his wound swelled. The anti-inflammatories the German sailors on the
U-19
gave him did no good. His hand continued suppurating and Captain Weisbach, commander of the
U-19
, predicted that if it wasn’t taken care of as soon as they landed, the wound would develop gangrene.

The last time he saw Captain Robert Monteith was in the ruins of McKenna’s Fort at dawn on April 21, when his two companions decided Roger should remain hidden there while they went to ask the Tralee Volunteers for help. They decided this because he was the one who ran the greatest risk of being recognized by the soldiers—the most sought-after prize for the watchdogs of the Empire—and because he could not endure any more. Sick and weakened, he had fallen down twice, exhausted, and the second time was unconscious for several minutes. After shaking his hand, his friends left him in the ruins of Fort McKenna with a revolver and a small bag of clothes. Roger recalled how, when he saw the larks flying around him and heard their song and discovered he was surrounded by wild violets growing out of the sandy ground of Tralee Bay, he thought,
I have reached Ireland at last
. His eyes filled with tears. Captain Monteith, when he left, had given him a military salute. Small, strong, agile, untiring, an Irish patriot to the marrow of his bones. Roger didn’t hear a single complaint from him or detect the slightest symptom of weakness in him during the six months they had lived together in Germany, in spite of the failures he’d had in Limburg Camp because of the resistance—when it wasn’t open hostility—of the prisoners to enrolling in the Irish Brigade Roger wanted to form to fight alongside Germany (“but not under their command”) for the independence of Ireland.

Monteith was soaked from head to foot, his swollen, bleeding hand badly wrapped in a rag that was coming loose, and with an expression of great fatigue. Walking with energetic strides in the direction of Tralee, he and Sergeant Bailey, who was limping, were lost in the fog. Had Robert Monteith arrived without being captured by the officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary? Had he managed to make contact in Tralee with people from the IRB (the Irish Republican Brotherhood) or the Volunteers? He never learned how and where Bailey was captured. His name was never mentioned in the long interrogations to which Roger was subjected, first in the Admiralty by the heads of the British intelligence services, and then by Scotland Yard. The sudden appearance of Daniel Bailey as a witness for the public prosecutor at his trial for treason dismayed Roger. In his statement, filled with lies, Monteith was not named once. Was he still free or had they killed him? Roger prayed the captain was safe and sound now, hiding in some corner of Ireland. Or had he taken part in the Easter Rising and perished there like so many anonymous Irish fighting in an adventure as heroic as it was rash? This was most likely. That he had been in the Dublin Post Office, firing, beside Tom Clarke whom he so admired, until an enemy bullet put an end to his exemplary life.

His had been a rash adventure as well. Believing that by coming to Ireland from Germany he would be able, by himself, using pragmatic and rational arguments, to stop the Rising planned so secretly by the Military Council of the Irish Volunteers—Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and one more—that not even the president of the Irish Volunteers, Professor Eoin MacNeill, had been informed. Wasn’t it another delirious fantasy?
Reason doesn’t convince mystics or martyrs
, he thought. In the bosom of the Irish Volunteers, Roger had been a participant in and witness to long, intense arguments regarding his thesis that the only way an armed action by the Irish nationalists against the British Empire would succeed was if it coincided with a German military offensive that would keep the bulk of British military power immobilized. He and young Plunkett had spent many hours in Berlin arguing about this without coming to an agreement. Was it because the heads of the Military Council never shared his conviction that the IRB and the Volunteers who prepared the insurrection hid their plans from him until the last moment? When, at last, the information reached him in Berlin, Roger already knew that the German admiralty had rejected a naval offensive against Britain. When the Germans agreed to send arms to the insurrectionists, he insisted on going in person to Ireland, accompanying the weapons, secretly intending to persuade the leaders that an uprising at this time would be a useless sacrifice. He had not been wrong about that. According to all the news he had been able to gather here and there since the days of his trial, the Rising was a heroic gesture, but it cost the lives of the most intrepid leaders of the IRB and the Volunteers and the imprisonment of hundreds of revolutionaries. The repression now would be interminable. The independence of Ireland had taken yet another step backward.

He had a bitter taste in his mouth. Another serious mistake: having put too much hope in Germany. He recalled his argument with Herbert Ward in Paris, the last time he saw him. His best friend in Africa from the time they met, both young and eager for adventures, he mistrusted all nationalisms. He was one of the few educated, sensitive Europeans on African soil, and Roger learned a great deal from him. They exchanged books, commented on their readings, talked and argued about music, painting, poetry, and politics. Herbert dreamed of being an artist exclusively some day and stole all the time he could from his job and dedicated it to sculpting human African types in wood and clay. Both had been harsh critics of the abuses and crimes of colonialism, and when Roger became a public figure and the target of attacks for his
Report on the Congo
, Herbert and Sarita, his wife, living in Paris where he had become an acclaimed sculptor who, for the most part, made castings in bronze, inspired by Africa, were his most enthusiastic defenders. And they were as well when his
Report on Putumayo
, denouncing the crimes committed by the rubber barons in Putumayo against the indigenous people, provoked another scandal around the figure of Roger Casement. Herbert had even shown sympathy at first for Roger’s nationalist conversion, though often in letters he joked about the dangers of “patriotic fanaticism” and reminded him of Dr. Johnson’s phrase, according to which “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Their rapport came to an end on the subject of Germany. Herbert always energetically rejected the positive, beautified vision Roger had of Chancellor Bismarck, unifier of the German states, and of the “Prussian spirit,” which he thought rigid, authoritarian, coarse, hostile to imagination and sensitivity, and more akin to barracks and military hierarchies than to democracy and the arts. When, in the middle of the war, he learned from denunciations in the British newspapers that Roger had gone to Berlin to conspire with the enemy, he had a letter sent to him, through his sister Nina, putting an end to their friendship of so many years. In the same letter he let him know that his and Sarita’s eldest son, a boy of nineteen, had just died at the front.

How many other friends had he lost, people like Herbert and Sarita Ward, who had appreciated and admired him and now considered him a traitor? Even Alice Stopford Green, his teacher and friend, had objected to his trip to Berlin although, after he was captured, she never mentioned their disagreement again. How many others were repelled by him because of the vile things the British press attributed to him? A stomach cramp obliged him to curl up on his cot. He remained like that for a long time until the sensation of a stone in his belly crushing his intestines had passed.