The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (44 page)

When the jailer closed the cell door, Roger lay down on his cot. He sighed, restless. The conversation with Alice had not done him good. Now he felt sadness at not having been there in his Volunteer uniform, Mauser in hand, taking part in the Rising, not caring that this armed action would end in a slaughter. Perhaps Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and the others were right. It wasn’t a question of winning but of resisting as much as possible. Of sacrificing oneself, like the Christian martyrs of heroic times. Their blood was the seed that germinated, did away with pagan idols and replaced them with Christ the Redeemer. The blood shed by the Volunteers would also bear fruit, it would open the eyes of the blind and win freedom for Ireland. How many companions and friends from Sinn Féin, the Volunteers, the Citizen Army, the IRB had been at the barricades, knowing it was a suicidal battle? No doubt hundreds, thousands, Patrick Pearse the first among them. He always believed martyrdom was the principal weapon of a just struggle. Didn’t that form part of the Irish character, the Celtic inheritance? The Catholic ability to accept suffering was already in Cuchulain, in the mythic heroes of Ireland and their great feats, and by the same token, in the serene heroism of the saints his friend Alice had studied with so much love and knowledge: an infinite capacity for great gestures. An impractical spirit of the Irish, perhaps, but compensated for by immoderate generosity in embracing the most daring dreams of justice, equality, and happiness. Even when defeat was inevitable. No matter how rash the plan of Pearse, Tom Clarke, Plunkett, and the others, in those six days of unequal combat the spirit of the Irish people had come into view for the world to admire: indomitable in spite of so many centuries of servitude, idealistic, fearless, ready for anything in a just cause. How different from the attitude of those compatriots who were prisoners in Limburg camp, blind and deaf to his exhortations. Theirs was the other face of Ireland: the face of the submissive, those who, because of centuries of colonization, had lost the valiant spark that brought so many women and men to the barricades of Dublin. Had he made another mistake in his life? What would have happened if the German weapons on the
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had reached the hands of the Volunteers on the night of April 20 in Tralee Bay? He imagined hundreds of patriots on bicycles, in automobiles and carts, on mules and donkeys, spreading out under the stars and distributing weapons and ammunition throughout the territory of Ireland. Would the twenty thousand rifles, ten machine guns, and five million rounds of ammunition in the hands of the insurgents have changed things? At least the battles would have lasted longer, the rebels would have defended themselves better and inflicted more losses on the enemy. Happily he noted he was yawning. Sleep would erase those images and calm his disquiet. He thought he was sinking.

He had a pleasant dream. His mother appeared and disappeared, smiling, beautiful, and graceful in her wide straw hat, a ribbon hanging from it that floated in the breeze. A coquettish flowered parasol protected the whiteness of her cheeks from the sun. Anne Jephson’s eyes were fixed on him and Roger’s were fixed on her and nothing and no one seemed capable of interrupting their silent, tender communication. But suddenly Captain Roger Casement appeared in the grove wearing his resplendent Light Dragoons uniform. He looked at Anne Jephson with eyes that showed an obscene greed. So much vulgarity offended and frightened Roger. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have the strength to prevent what would happen or to start running and rid himself of that horrible presentiment. With tears in his eyes, trembling with terror and indignation, he saw the captain lift up his mother. He heard her give a scream of surprise and then a forced, complaisant little laugh. Trembling with disgust and jealousy, he saw her kick in the air, showing her slim ankles, while his father ran, carrying her among the trees. They were becoming lost from sight in the grove and their laughter tapered off until it disappeared. Now he heard the wind sighing and the warbling of the birds. He didn’t cry. The world was cruel and unjust, and rather than suffering like this, it would be better to die.

The dream went on for a long while, but when he woke, still in darkness, minutes or hours later, Roger no longer remembered its outcome. Not knowing the time disturbed him again. Occasionally he forgot, but the slightest uneasiness, doubt, or worry made the piercing distress of not knowing what moment of the day or night he was in produced ice in his heart, the feeling of having been expelled from time, of living in a limbo where before, now, afterward did not exist.

A little more than three months had passed since his capture, and he felt as if he had spent years behind bars, in an isolation in which day by day, hour by hour, he was losing his humanity. He didn’t tell Alice, but if he once had been encouraged by the hope the British government would accept the petition for clemency and commute the death penalty to imprisonment, he had lost it now. In the climate of rage and desire for vengeance in which the Easter Rising had placed the Crown, in particular the military, Britain needed an exemplary punishment for the traitors who saw in Germany, the enemy against whom the Empire was fighting in the fields of Flanders, Ireland’s ally in her struggle for emancipation. The strange thing was that the cabinet had put off the decision for so long. What were they waiting for? Did they want to prolong his agony, making him pay for his ingratitude toward the country that decorated him and knighted him and which he had repaid by conspiring with its adversary? No, in politics feelings didn’t matter, only interest and profit. The government must be coldly evaluating the advantages and damages his execution would bring. Would it serve as a warning? Would the government’s relations with the Irish worsen? The campaign to discredit him claimed no one would cry over this human disgrace, this degenerate that decent society would be rid of thanks to the gallows. It was stupid to have left those diaries for anyone to find when he went to the United States. A piece of negligence that the Empire would make very good use of and that for a long time would cloud the truth of his life, his political conduct, and even his death.

He fell back to sleep. This time, instead of a dream, he had a nightmare he hardly remembered the next morning. In it there appeared a little bird, a canary with a clear voice martyrized by the bars of the cage in which it was enclosed. This could be seen in the desperation with which it beat its small golden wings unceasingly, as if with this movement the bars would widen and let it leave. Its eyes moved constantly in their sockets, pleading for commiseration. Roger, a boy in short pants, told his mother that cages shouldn’t exist, or zoos, and animals always ought to live in freedom. At the same time, something secret was happening, a danger was approaching, something invisible that his sensibility detected, something insidious, treacherous, already there and prepared to strike. He was perspiring, trembling like a small sheet of paper.

He woke, so agitated he could barely breathe. He was choking. His heart was pounding so hard it perhaps was the beginning of a heart attack. Should he call the guard on duty? He stopped immediately. What could be better than dying here, on his cot, a natural death that would free him from the gallows? Moments later his heart calmed down and he could breathe again normally.

Would Father Carey come today? He wanted to see him and have a long conversation about subjects and concerns that had a great deal to do with the soul, religion, and God, and very little to do with politics. And immediately, as he became more tranquil and began to forget his recent nightmare, he recalled his last meeting with the prison chaplain and the moment of sudden tension that filled him with anxiety. They were talking about his conversion to Catholicism. Father Carey told him once again he shouldn’t talk about “conversion,” for having been baptized as a child, he had never left the Church. The act would be a reactualization of his status as a Catholic, something that didn’t require a formal step. In any case—and at that moment, Roger noticed that Father Carey hesitated, searching carefully for words to avoid offending him—His Eminence Cardinal Bourne had thought that if it seemed suitable to Roger, he could sign a document, a private text between him and the Church, expressing his will to return, a reaffirmation of his status as a Catholic and at the same time a testimony of renunciation and repentance for old errors and faults.

Father Carey could not hide how uncomfortable he felt.

There was silence. Then, Roger said softly:

“I won’t sign any document, Father Carey. My reincorporation into the Catholic Church should be something intimate, with you as the only witness.”

“That’s how it will be.”

Another tense silence followed.

“Was Cardinal Bourne referring to what I suppose?” Roger asked. “I mean, the campaign against me, the accusations concerning my private life. Is that what I should atone for in a document in order to be readmitted to the Catholic Church?”

Father Carey’s breathing had become more rapid. Again he searched for words before responding.

“Cardinal Bourne is a good and generous man, with a compassionate spirit,” he finally stated. “But don’t forget, Roger, you have on your shoulders the responsibility to watch over the good name of the Church in a country where Catholics are a minority and there are still those who foment great phobias concerning us.”

“Tell me frankly, Father Carey: has Cardinal Bourne made it a condition of my being readmitted to the Catholic Church that I sign a document repenting of the vile, vicious things I’m accused of in the press?”

“It isn’t a condition, merely a suggestion,” said the cleric. “You can accept it or not and that won’t change anything. You were baptized. You’re a Catholic and will go on being one. Let’s not talk about this matter any further.”

And in fact, they spoke no more about it. But the thought of that dialogue returned periodically and led him to wonder whether his desire to return to his mother’s church was pure or stained by the circumstances of his situation. Wasn’t it an act decided for political reasons? To show his solidarity with the Irish Catholics in favor of independence and his hostility to the minority, most of them Protestant, who wanted to continue as part of the Empire? In the eyes of God, what validity would a conversion have that at bottom obeyed nothing spiritual but his longing to feel sheltered by a community, to be part of a great tribe? God would see in that kind of conversion the gesticulations of a shipwrecked man.

“What matters now, Roger, is not Cardinal Bourne, or me, or the Catholics in England, or the ones in Ireland,” said Father Carey. “What matters now is you. Your reencounter with God. There’s the strength, the truth, the peace you deserve after an intense life filled with the many trials you’ve had to face.”

“Yes, yes, Father Carey,” Roger agreed eagerly. “I know. Exactly. I try to make myself heard, to reach Him. At certain times, not very often, it seems I have. Then I finally feel a little peace, that incredible calm. Like certain nights in Africa, with a full moon, the sky filled with stars, not a drop of wind moving the trees, the murmur of the insects. Everything so beautiful, so tranquil, I would always think: ‘God exists. How, seeing what I see, could I even imagine He doesn’t?’ But at other times, most of the time, I don’t see Him, He doesn’t answer, He doesn’t listen to me. In my life, most of the time, I’ve felt very alone. Nowadays it happens very frequently. But God’s solitude is much worse. Then, I tell myself: ‘God doesn’t listen to me and won’t listen to me. I’m going to die as alone as I’ve lived.’ It’s something that torments me day and night, Father.”

“He is there, Roger. He listens to you. He knows what you feel, that you need Him. He will not fail. If there’s something I can guarantee, that I’m absolutely sure of, it’s that God will not fail you.”

In the dark, stretched out on his cot, Roger thought Father Carey had imposed on himself a task as heroic or even more heroic than that of the rebels at the barricades: bringing consolation and peace to desperate, destroyed creatures who were going to spend many years in a cell or were preparing themselves for the gallows. A terrible, potentially dehumanizing work that on many days must have driven Father Carey, above all at the beginning of his ministry, to despair. But he knew how to hide it. He always stayed calm and at every moment transmitted a feeling of comprehension and solidarity that did Roger so much good. Once they had talked about the Rising.

“What would you have done, Father Carey, if you had been in Dublin during those days?”

“Go to lend spiritual aid to whoever needed it, as so many priests did.”

He added that it wasn’t necessary to agree with the rebels’ idea that the freedom of Ireland would be achieved only with weapons to offer them spiritual support.

Of course it wasn’t what Father Carey believed; he had always urged a visceral rejection of violence. But he would have gone to hear confessions, give communion, pray for whoever asked him to, help the nurses and doctors. That is what a good number of male and female religious had done, and the hierarchy had supported them. Shepherds had to be where the flock was, didn’t they?

All of that was true, but it was also true there was never enough room for the idea of God in the limited space of human reason. It had to be squeezed in with a shoehorn because it never fit completely. Roger and Herbert Ward had often spoken about this. “In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason,” Herbert would say. “If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke.”

Roger had spent his life believing and doubting. Not even now, at the door of death, was he capable of believing in God with the resolute faith of his mother, his father, or his brothers and sister. How lucky those people were for whom the existence of the Supreme Being had never been a problem but a certainty, thanks to which the world was ordered and everything had an explanation and a reason for being. People who believed in that way would undoubtedly achieve a resignation in the face of death never known by those, like him, who had lived playing hide-and-seek with God. Roger recalled that he had once written a poem with that title: “Hide-and-Seek with God.” But Herbert Ward assured him it was very bad, and he threw it away. Too bad. He would have liked to reread and correct it now.