Pandora in the Congo

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  But Marcus didn’t care about anything or anyone. He was no longer a man; he was a hare. Tectons! Run, run for your life, Marcus Garvey, run!

  Thousands of branches whipped at his face and thighs. He only stopped when he was panting and completely out of breath. He hid himself at the foot of a tree, where he huddled in the angle created by the tree’s trunk and a spur of wood, with his arms crossed over his knees. From far away, from the clearing, he could hear the sounds of battle. He could hear shots and shouts. William and Richard urged each other on. The Tectons’ voices were spine chilling. He had never heard anything like it.

  He didn’t know what to do. His whole body was shaking, like a lunatic after a cold shower. He hid his head in his arms and closed his eyes. Sometimes, the shooting and the screams were more intense. Other times, the racket stopped as if it had ended, but soon after resurged with renewed energy. The Cravers must have been using the sticks of dynamite as hand grenades, because he could also hear explosions. At some point Marcus opened his eyes. And before him stood a man.

  He was an incredibly small man, with skin that was black but with red tones. All he wore was a piece of tree bark covering his genitals. He carried a spear. But he didn’t seem aggressive in the least. He wasn’t a good man, he wasn’t a bad man. He was some other sort of man. And he was a disconcerted man. He looked at Marcus and then towards the noises in the clearing. When he looked back at Marcus it was as if he were demanding explanations of him.

  Marcus grasped that for him the Tectons and the Englishmen were one and the same thing. For him there was no difference between Marcus and the Cravers, between the Cravers and the Tectons. For that small man there was only an incomprehensible battle and unpleasant noises. He once again stared at Marcus with eyes that overflowed with contempt, and he asked him for the last time: what is all that?

  Marcus didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything. He only trembled, shrivelled at the base of the tree. The little man turned and left. He moved like a cat, noiselessly and without looking back.

  The battle continued. Marcus thought it would never end. But all of a sudden the shots, screams and explosions could no longer be heard. First there was an almost complete silence, and then, once again, the syncopated rhythm of the jungle.

  And what did Marcus do when he had caught his breath? He went back to the clearing. When I asked him what his motives were for such an incomprehensible act he didn’t know what to say.

  What nonsense. I would have understood if Marcus had stayed at the clearing to fight, and I also understood why he had fled. What I couldn’t comprehend was his return to the horror. He knew the Craver brothers’ position was untenable. He had seen the Tectons break through the enclosure of trunks, going beyond the last defences. And even so he went back.

  I was insistent, I wanted to understand his reasoning. But there were many episodes that Marcus was unable to explain. He fell silent, overcome by the magnitude of the events he was relating. I never reproached him for his silences or his wavering: in fact, the opposite, I tried to get him unstuck. Often I had to reconstruct the narrative thread of the story by groping around. I could understand the pain, for him, in recalling these events. And, on top of that, he had to do so from a desperate personal situation, locked up in a prison and awaiting the gallows. Anyone may survive an avalanche, a war, a disillusionment. But not everyone is capable of explaining the experience. Even less so, a simple stableboy like Marcus Garvey. What’s more, I was demanding that he make sense of a world that held no apparent logic.

  So then, why did Marcus Garvey go back to the clearing? After my questioning I could only arrive at one conclusion.

  Did Marcus know what awaited him? My conclusion was yes, he knew. That is as certain as the fact that he was inseparably tied to Amgam. In order to understand Marcus’s reaction there was only one logical answer: that there are things, like love, that aren’t. Love can’t be measured with the rationality of a compass.

  Marcus pulled back the last screen of vegetation that separated him from the clearing. The day was dying. The sun had become an orange ball that danced above the branches of the trees. William and Richard were sitting on the ground, surprisingly alive, back-to- back with their heads bowed, watched over by a single Tecton. Their faces were still blackened from the smoke and gunpowder of the battle. There was something unnatural in the image of the Craver brothers suffering a defeat. They were furious souls, they were destructive scourges. They had been raised to win, they were born to burn the world. And now they sat defenceless, beaten by the powers of an unforeseen element. Like torches in the rain.

  He saw a few Tectons, five or six, resting by the tents. There was another Tecton, standing up, closer and with his back to Marcus. All of the Tectons had very oval skulls, but this one’s was conical, like a bullet. He was incredibly tall, well over six feet. The light of dusk gave him a drawn-out shadow like a giraffe’s. He held his helmet in the crook of his arm, his hand on his hip, and looked directly at the sun, his chin high. That way of holding the helmet gave him an aristocratic elegance. It was the seal of the perfect officer: lithe, straight-backed. He had just survived a terrible battle but his armour was already clean again. He even had time to take an interest in the sun. More than observing it, it was as if he wanted to suck it in.

  For some reason the Tecton turned. He saw Marcus. He had a big horse’s head, powerful and with long cheeks. Now, with his back to the sun, the pupils of the Tecton’s enormous feline eyes contracted with frightening speed. But he didn’t attack. Quite the opposite. He approached Marcus slowly and with his free hand grabbed him by the elbow. He took him to where William and Richard sat. He did it without any hostility, like someone helping a blind person across the street. Marcus didn’t resist. Even he was surprised by his own docility. All he did was move his head to the left and right, looking for Amgam. He couldn’t see her. The Tecton made him sit with the Craver brothers. He moved back a few steps and immersed himself again in his attentive contemplation of the sun.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Marcus.

  ‘And where were you?’ replied William.

  ‘If we are prisoners of war then you should respect our condition as such,’ said Richard. ‘There are international laws.’

  Marcus heard the comment and for a long while couldn’t think of anything else. How could someone like Richard Craver ask that they apply laws of war to him? Richard didn’t understand anything. Maybe he didn’t want to understand it.

  Throughout the whole day the Tectons rested or looked over their spoils. Very few Tectons had survived the bullets and the dynamite. Marcus counted them: five, six, seven. Only seven.

  When it got dark, though, all the Tectons came closer. The refined officer said something to his men, and they began to beat them with their feet and fists. At first, it was obviously revenge for their dead. The only thing that the Englishmen could do was protect their heads and genitals and wait for the beating to end. But it didn’t end. William, Richard and Marcus found themselves in the middle of a circle, surrounded by Tectons that pounded on them furiously. The violence gradually took on a more calculated intensity. Marcus realised that the officer repeated some sounds. It was no longer punishment. The Tectons wanted to turn the blows into a message. The officer pointed to their bodies with a long thin finger. What was he trying to tell them?

  Pain is an impatient teacher. Marcus took off his shirt. As a reward, the Tecton stopped the beating.

  ‘Take off your clothes!’ Marcus told them.

  While they were removing an article of clothing they weren’t beaten. But if they stopped, the blows continued. They didn’t let them keep on even their underwear. Marcus had only ever seen Richard’s arms and neck, which were browned by the sun. Now he discovered that the rest of his skin was as pink as a piglet’s. The Tectons laughed.

  A group of Tectons laughing was a frightening sight. All those faces encircling them, white as the moon, mortuary pale, their laughter sounding like crows.
Their lips were much thinner than the Englishmen’s, and their teeth had a yellow patina. They pointed between the three Englishmen’s legs and laughed. The prisoners covered their genitals with their hands, but their captors moved them aside so the objects of their admiration could be easily seen.

  ‘Why do we have to put up with this?’ exclaimed Richard. ‘We’re British.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ warned William. ‘Take off your clothes.’

  By now Richard was completely nude except for some woollen socks held to his calves by silver garters. Those garters would cost him his life.

  The garters became one of the Tectons’ object of desire. He knelt down to snatch them from him. Infuriated, Richard responded with a kick to the thief ’s nose. The other Tectons fell on him. Richard struggled. His arms emerged every once in a while from within a mêlée of white appendages. A crunch was heard, a sound like nuts cracking. It was Richard’s knee. That put an end to his resistance and the Tectons forgot about him. But neither William nor Marcus could come to his aid: the Tectons approached them and left some large objects shaped like half eggs at their feet. They were reminiscent of giant tortoiseshells, with cloth lining. Black straps hung from the sides. Marcus and William looked at the shells without knowing what to do. More blows. They tied the shells to their backs as if they were haversacks. The blows stopped.

  The Tectons turned back to Richard. A couple of them looked at his wounded knee the same way a blacksmith might examine a horse’s hoof.

  ‘Stand up, Richard! Stand up!’ shouted Marcus without taking his hands from the back of his neck.

  ‘I can’t,’ he moaned. ‘My knee is broken.’

  ‘You can walk! You have to walk!’ insisted Marcus.

  William caught on, ‘Come on, Richard! Strap a shell on your back and walk!’

  A Tecton took out a knife with a wide, short blade. Richard saw it.

  ‘I’m fine!’ he shouted. ‘You hear me? I’ve never felt better!’

  What is the Congo? The Congo isn’t a place. The Congo is the other side of the universe. And among all the possible Congos there is, without a doubt, a Congo in the service of atonement. Did Richard Craver understand that before dying? The Tecton stabbed him once in the back of the neck.

  They must have hit a nerve, because Richard’s legs and arms went rigid, as if they had been subjected to an intense electric current. But he didn’t die. Not yet. The Tecton finished him off with clumsy stabs. A second Tecton reproached the executioner’s ineptitude. Richard’s contractions intensified, his eyes rolled back into his head. Two stabs more, three.

  Then, Marcus and William were jostled to their feet. There was no doubt where the Tectons were taking them: the mine. Marcus and William went down the ladder, the Tectons slid down ropes that hung from the anthill. When they were all inside the mine, two Tectons entered one of the tunnels headfirst. Another Tecton stuck Marcus’s shell into the same tunnel. With violent mimicry they indicated what they expected of him: that he advance into the hole with the shell in front of him, pushing it along. He resisted. He would never go in there, never. He felt hands all over his body, some held his arms, other grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, trying to get him to lower his head. Marcus struggled like a madman in a straitjacket. A club hit his lips. He spat pieces of teeth and blood into the faces of his attackers. He wouldn’t go in there! As he was struggling, she appeared. Amgam.

  The Tectons received her with a wordless clamour. She was wearing William’s white trousers and white shirt. She approached Marcus. The Tectons stopped hitting him, observing the scene with feigned indifference. She was one of them yet radically different. The tall Tecton officer paid attention to her. He stopped her with his hand, delicately, and asked her questions as if he had known her for many years. His tone of voice was gentle, her answers weren’t. Marcus had never thought that a Tecton man could speak with such delicacy. Two of his fingers kept Amgam from getting closer to him. Marcus held his tongue: not even his desperate situation got in the way of his realising that the officer and Amgam made a perfect couple. William hung his head. Before him was the woman that he had kept prisoner night after night. One word from her and the Tectons would rip out his arms and legs one by one, slowly. But she ignored him. All of her attention was for Marcus.

  Amgam caressed one of Marcus’s cheeks. He felt the comforting warmth of that hot hand. Because of Marcus Garvey’s express wishes, I won’t reproduce here the meaning of what she conveyed to him, and which he understood very well. (As ridiculous as it may appear, sixty years later and after everything that has happened, I still respect his wishes.) She kissed him on the lips. Him. And Amgam’s public kiss was much more than a kiss.

  The Tectons separated them. Marcus emboldened his resistance. He would never go into the tunnel! Never! The Tectons carried flexible black clubs and they beat him on the kidneys with powerful agonising blows. Marcus yelled. His shrill squeaks were like a badly oiled hinge.

  Seconds later he complied.

  NINETEEN

  ONCE I WAS INTRODUCED to the ranks I had only one objective: to keep myself as far from the enemy as possible. My logic was very simple: if the Germans could drop a six-hundred pound bomb on the dining room of my house, in London, what would they be capable of if I got anywhere near them? Unfortunately, my intentions and my fate were not headed in the same direction.

  And now someone might ask: must you interrupt the story right now, when Marcus is going through one of his most trying times, to explain your trivial little battles? Well, the answer is yes, that is what I intend to do. This isn’t the story of Marcus Garvey. It’s not even the story of the love between Amgam and Marcus. This is the story of the story. Which is to say, of Tommy Thomson’s love for Amgam. And if I talk about my state in the trenches it’s because it too relates to the book.

  * * *

  They sent me to an infantry regiment. When we were in France, waiting to be sent to the front, an officer showed up at our camp. He had us queue up in front of the khaki sea of tents and asked for volunteers for the artillery. I stepped forward. The idea I had was that artillery fought from a distance. With a bit of luck I wouldn’t see a German in the entire war. Blessed innocence.

  They turned me into an artillery observer. My job was to penetrate no-man’s land, drag myself to some spot from which I could observe enemy lines and direct our cannons. In other words: three days after raising my hand I was crawling through the mud, in the rain and right under the Germans’ noses.

  I don’t think that in the entire history of the British army there was ever a Tommy as useless as First Soldier Thomas Thomson. I had to drag myself and a portable telephone and unrolling telephone cable. It goes without saying that the German snipers’ immediate priority was to shoot down the artillery observers. To top it all off, some administrative genius had given me a helmet three sizes bigger than my head. It danced like a spinning top, falling over one ear and then the other. Or, worse still, covered my eyes like a giant visor. At least it worked as an umbrella. For the seven days that I was on the front it practically never stopped raining. And what rain! How was I supposed to inform them on the movements in the German trenches when I could barely see the tips of my fingers when I extended my arm?

  During the long empty hours in no-man’s land I had time to think about my future. I decided that I would become a new Doctor Flag. Why not? I had been his ghost writer, so there was nothing standing in the way of my replacing him. I would explain my project to some bold editor. Any publisher in the world would sign me on. We could start a new collection to compete with old Flag. I would write all the books. Without ghost writers.

  I recall that the morning of my sixth day on the front dawned cloudless. It wasn’t raining and I found myself on top of a small hill. The relative height and the dry air allowed me to appreciate the region’s landscape for the first time. I was able to see that the ocean of mud only extended between the British and the German positions. At the re
arguard of the German line I could see a magnificent French plain, green, wet, dotted with church bell towers. They were all over, scattered throughout the entire area, here and there, silhouetted against the blue horizon. Those bell towers were uniquely beautiful, attracting one’s gaze like magnets.

  The last thing I was expecting was that someone would wish any harm on those jewels of medieval architecture. All of a sudden, though, one of the bell towers collapsed. At first I thought it was a misguided rocket from our artillery. But other bell towers started to fall in unison. What a scene! I scanned the horizon with my binoculars and, just as soon as I located a tower, it disappeared in a cloud of smoke and ash. They sank as if the earth had sucked them up, which made me realise that these were controlled explosions. The Germans were destroying any point that the enemy artillery observers could use as a reference. I felt vaguely guilty.

  Don’t ask me how, but somehow I established a relationship between my future as the new Doctor Flag and my role in this destruction. In theory I bore no responsibility for the Germans blowing up those stone works of art. But it was also undeniable that they were destroying those bell towers because someone, namely me, was looking at them.

  I had let myself be led that war like a lamb to the slaughter. And once I was wrapped in a sheep’s uniform it was useless to try to get out of my responsibilities as a sheep. Sheep aren’t innocent, they’re idiotic. What had I said one day to Marcus Garvey? ‘I never would have gone to the Congo.’ A lie. It was impossible to imagine a larger massacre than that war, and in the heart of Europe itself. The Congo wasn’t a place, the Congo was us. The day I consented to enlist I became the Marcus Garvey that held out his hand so that the Craver brothers could put lit sticks of dynamite in it. He threw the sticks one by one, I directed cannon fire to targets. Which was worse?

  I should have understood it before. If I accepted my future as Doctor Flag, if I renounced literature in order to devote myself, simply, to writing pamphlets, what I was doing was enlisting in the ranks of human resignation. Every good book that I didn’t write would be a bell tower destroyed. I said to myself, ‘To hell with Flag! I’m not Flag’s ghost writer, I don’t want to be Flag. What I have to do is go home and write the book, and rewrite it a thousand times, and a thousand more, if necessary, until a great book comes out of it.’