Pandora in the Congo

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  And so I arrived at the sixth and last day of my stay on the front. I will never forget it. I found myself inside a hole that had been created by a large-calibre shell. It was shaped like a funnel and was larger than a circle of nursery schoolchildren. It began to rain again. I squeezed into the bottom of the crater as much as I could. At dusk there was a violent artillery battle. Since I was halfway between the British and the German positions, the projectiles from one side and the other made parabolas just above my head. There was an undeniable beauty in that pyrotechnic display. What a long night. I was beneath a cover of fire yet it was raining, raining more than ever. From the brim of my helmet fell cascades of water. I have never again been as soaked as I was that day. The only thing I could do was curl up like a child, hugging my legs.

  I couldn’t move, I could only wait, so I entertained myself thinking about her, Amgam. At first I tried to mentally reconstruct her to the last detail of her hand. The matte whiteness of her skin, her six fingers, the extraordinary way her nails fitted into her flesh, up to the first joint on each finger. Then I thought about Amgam’s vagina. Marcus hadn’t mentioned it at all. What must it have been like? As white as the rest of her skin? Why couldn’t it be black, as black as the pupils of her eyes? Red? Blue? Yellow? In the book, naturally, I didn’t bring it up. Too obscene. However, as projectiles from the British German artilleries crossed over my head, I thought about the vagina of a Tecton woman.

  The storm of bombs and the rainstorm stopped first thing in the morning. At the same moment, as if the artillery and the meteo rology had signed an accord. My arms and legs were numb. There was a general silence, which was even more disquieting because it followed that monstrous racket. I started to worry. I had better get back to the trenches, and as quickly as possible. With all the caution in the world, I stuck out my nose. What I saw was an image of purgatory: an orange and violet-coloured fog coming towards me.

  Never had three letters hidden such horror: gas! Future generations have had trouble understanding the fear that gas provoked as a military weapon. Gas! I put on my mask, but the bands didn’t fit well round the back of my neck. I left the hole, pulling myself along on my knees and elbows. But I didn’t get very far. About three hundred feet away, advancing behind the gas cloud, I saw thousands of figures coming towards me. Germans. They were advancing towards the English trenches. And me.

  Even now, after so much time has passed, some nights I still dream of that French morning. The German officers used whistles to spur on their infantry. I remember that pointy, sharp language, packed with crackles and curses. They wore green uniforms, dirty with mud, and carried very long bayonets. Their helmets were much more compact than ours, which seemed more like toy chamber pots. Their masks had enormous round glass eyes. The helmets and the masks covered their heads and turned them into creatures closer to insects than to humans. They could have been Martians as easily as Germans.

  The glass of my mask misted up. I was terrified. If I stayed there the Germans would kill me. If I went back it was most likely that, in the confusion, our men (in that sector a brigade of Irishmen) would shoot me. To top it all off, a few days earlier the Irish rebellion had broken out, and everyone doubted the brigade’s loyalty. (Later I found out that they had maintained their positions with courage worthy of a higher cause.) Desperate, I opted to go back to the crater. I would hide there, I’d play dead. But I didn’t foresee that gas has a tendency to collect in concave places in the terrain. Horrified, I saw that a large bubble of gas, half violet and half orange, had installed itself at the bottom of the hole. I was submerged in it. My ill-fitting mask danced over my face like the helmet did over my head. I looked up for a second, and I saw the surface of the world with the perspective of a fish. A wave of Germans was passing my position. I saw their boots and their legs. Some of them even stopped, using the upper part of the crater to hide themselves from the British fire, but the officers urged them to push on. More Germans came, then more and more. I didn’t know there were so many Germans in the world. What could I do? If I stayed curled up down there, the gas would finish me off in only a few minutes. But if I moved the Germans would discover me. I didn’t do anything, I buried my head underground like an ostrich. I felt my eyes swell to the size of potatoes. Red tears slid down the glass of the mask, and I realised I was crying blood. I dug with my hands. I burrowed a bit more into that soft humid earth. It was as if I were swimming, submerging myself. At first I told myself that I was digging to better camouflage myself from the Germans, but I think I was reacting that way simply because it was the only thing I could do.

  And that was when the toxic mirages began. An instructor had warned us that gas absorption blocked the brain’s access to oxygen and that brought on delirium. I knew that what I saw were hallucinations, but that didn’t make them any less real.

  The ground turned to liquid. At first it was an ocean of those horrible orange and violet colours, but the fusion of the two colours turned into a very dark, very sweet green. My gas mask allowed me to see in that underwater world, but I had no air. At least I would die enjoying all that beauty, I thought. And when I was suffocating, when my lungs were about to explode, a figure appeared before me. At first it was a white spark, very far below my body, which ascended from the blackness of unimaginable depths. It was her.

  Our bodies came closer through that light, greenish, liquid world, exasperatingly slowly. Yes, it was her. But the gas I had inhaled made her shape more vivid than I had ever imagined it in any of my narrative efforts. I saw, for example, that she had a pear-shaped head, with an incredibly wide forehead. That forehead would normally have gone against my aesthetic criteria, as too exaggerated, but it didn’t concern me. She smiled, and small waves of skin appeared on her cheeks.

  I stretched out my hand as far as I could, towards her. She also moved a hand towards me, above me. That simple gesture made me immensely happy. Our fingers were very close to each other. We didn’t quite touch. The only thing I can say is that if we had touched I wouldn’t be writing all this now.

  Imagine, now, some sort of reverse avalanche, a natural force that instead of pulling us, sucked us in. I felt as if iron pliers had grabbed my ankles and were pulling me, separating me from Amgam. I have to conclude that those pliers saved my life.

  I had never been so close to the intangible. How can I justify, with any self-esteem, that one of the culminating moments of my existence was the product of a hallucination caused by military gas? Well, that’s how it is.

  The next memory I have is an infinitely more banal, and peculiar, feeling: waking up without being able to open my eyes. My face was covered with a big bandage. I inhaled deeply and my lungs filled with a mix of ether and mint. A hospital, I sensed. And if I was smelling such delicate odours, it must be a hospital quite far from the front. I must have been unconscious for days. I brought my hands to my face, reflexively. I was stopped by a woman’s voice, who warned me with an urgent scream, ‘Don’t do that! Don’t take the bandages off your eyes or you’ll stay blind forever!’

  I obeyed. Two more voices joined the conversation, the voices of two doctors very curious about my case.

  ‘You should be dead,’ explained one of them. ‘That’s why we’re so interested.’

  I was glad that my life had interested them enough to save it. From my wounds they only knew that they had been caused in a sector of the front that was affected by gas. Someone like me, located so far ahead, should have been more dead than a codfish in the desert. After an extensive interrogation they deduced that I had been saved thanks to my asthma. The asthma made me consume less air than is normal, and that’s how I avoided certain death.

  ‘Asthma!’ concluded the second doctor. ‘How can they send asthmatics to the front?’

  ‘That’s what I told them at the recruitment office but they didn’t listen to me.’

  ‘The war’s over for you,’ they announced.

  And they left.

  As for the circumstance
s surrounding my salvation, no one could give me any details. The medical staff only knew that I had arrived in their territory. While I was unconscious they had transferred me from some first aid post to a field hospital, and from there to that ward. It was impossible for me to follow the traces of my saviour.

  Who had pulled me by the ankles? Who knows. I’ve always liked to believe that it was a German. That someone had saved my life so generously, going against the interests of their Fatherland, would be irrefutable proof of one thing, of only one thing, but an important one: that on that battlefield where millions of combatants faced each other there was, at least, one gentleman.

  TWENTY

  SOME MONTHS AFTER THAT postman on a bicycle had handed me the recruitment papers, I went back to the same place where I had received it: sitting in front of the ruins of the boarding house. As a whole, it looked just as I had left it, a collapsed stone accordion. The authorities had put a cordon around the entire perimeter to discourage looters. That was all.

  Why go back to the ruins of the boarding house? Out of useless nostalgia, I believe, or to begin to orientate myself in my new life. I sat on top of a suitcase. I was there for a little while, looking at the house and playing with my fingers and my memories, until I noticed that someone had stuck a note on a pillar of debris. This is what it said:

  Hello Tommy. If you are reading this its because your alive and we are all very very hapy that your alive and not dead. Mareeantwonet is hapy to, I swear. Well, maybe your mutilated or missing an erm, or both. Or a leg, or both of them. Or both legs and both erms, because in war peple shoot and theres lots of splosions. We and Mareeantwonet dont care a lick about what your missing, just so you know. Maybe they sploded both your eyes and your blind. If you are, have someone reed you this note, because its from me.

  We now live sumware else. You tell me in my letters your regiment but you don’t answer and your regiment tell me that you are not in your regiment because youv volunteered for artilarry and that they cant tell me where artilarry is for security reasons. (our artilarry or the germans, that I don’t understand)

  If you read this note don’t move. You sit and wait. You sit and wait. Sit, damn it.

  Your good friend and fellow boarder:

  MacMahon

  I didn’t have time to do anything else. Behind me I heard an all too-familiar voice.

  ‘Tommy!’

  I’ll spare you the description of our mutual joy. MacMahon was very sentimental and he started crying, and when he told me that since he had hung up the note he came punctually every day to see if I were there, I got weepy too and since we were both crying we hugged, and being together crying made us cry even more. I’ll leave it at that.

  He went to the trouble of carrying my suitcase, whether I liked it or not. While we made the trip to the new boarding house he told me everything that had happened in my absence.

  For once Pinkerton’s foresight had been of some use. The house insurance that she had acquired decades ago had covered all the losses. And much more: since it was one of the first English houses affected by a bombing, the company used the incident to create a publicity campaign showing off their patriotism. The president of the insurance company took a handful of photos with Mrs Pinkerton while he handed over a cheque. And it was a handsome amount. With the money, and taking advantage of the fact that the war had lowered property values, she was able to buy herself another boarding house.

  ‘That’s the good news,’ said MacMahon.

  ‘You mean to say there’s bad news too?’

  MacMahon went from euphoric to despondent in half a blink of the eye. With two fingers he pressed on the upper part of his nose in an attempt to hold back the tears. MacMahon had very fat fingers and thick wrists. Such virile hands weren’t made for crying. And that made MacMahon’s crying an even sadder phenomenon.

  I guessed the reason.

  ‘Mary? Your wife? She was that ill? It can’t be!’ I cried out.

  MacMahon nodded, without looking at me, and said, ‘The flu.’

  I swallowed saliva. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘It was sudden,’ explained MacMahon. ‘It all happened very quickly after the army took you away. Luckily Rose let me bring the children to the boarding house.’

  ‘Who is Rose?’

  We had arrived at the new boarding house. It was in the same district and, like the last building, was a giant among dwarves. While the old one had shone with the beauty of a crypt, the new one oozed a comforting peace, as if it were an immense farm transported to the city.

  Once inside, the first person I came across was a woman about MacMahon’s age. She wore a blue dress with a colourful floral print. A woman that dresses so elegantly, with such modesty and such good taste, always awakens some fondness. Even still, I only gave her a quick glance, because I was looking for Mrs Pinkerton. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to thank her for opening up the doors of her boarding house to me. But MacMahon, who came in right behind me, warned me, ‘Rose.’

  And the woman said, ‘Welcome home, Tommy.’

  The collision between my memories and that voice made me very confused.

  ‘Mrs Pinkerton!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Mrs MacMahon,’ she corrected me.

  I didn’t even remember that Mrs Pinkerton was named Rose. I looked at Mr MacMahon, who was proudly nodding to corroborate the extraordinary news. He moved close to her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. I had never seen a kiss that was so chaste and, at the same time, so passionate. I was standing there with my mouth hanging open. In that moment I wouldn’t have been able to close it even with the help of a pair of pliers.

  ‘Congratulations, Mrs MacMahon,’ I finally stammered.

  ‘Thank you, Tommy,’ she said.

  They looked at each other as only two lovers could look at each other. As only Mr MacMahon and Mrs MacMahon could look at each other.

  Love had transformed Mrs Pinkerton. The change went beyond the wardrobe and hairstyle, far beyond. She was another person. Only someone like Mr MacMahon could have managed that heroic deed. I was so stunned that I had to sit down. I sat and stared at them, my mouth hanging open. Mrs Pinkerton loved Mr MacMahon. Mr MacMahon loved Mrs Pinkerton.

  I had the MacMahons in front of me, in profile, looking at each other like two dumbstruck lovebirds. I sensed, I suspected, that Tommy Thomson had lost direction some time ago, that he was being led by a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding so large that its proportions alone kept him from discovering it. It didn’t take a genius to realise the basic contradiction between a Thomson and a MacMahon. Love had taken me to the centre of the Earth, while he had found it in the sitting room of the house where he lived.

  In any case, I didn’t allow myself much time for reflection, because a tribe of red dwarves appeared at the door. They were MacMahon’s children, seven, eight, maybe nine, all of them exactly the same. The boys wore short trousers and the girls little skirts. They were all as redheaded as their father, all of them had hair as short as a brush, all of them boasted thousands of freckles on faces round as oranges. And all of them, boys and girls, had elbows and knees covered with scabs. They began to torture me with wooden sticks, which they used to poke me in the armpit and the ankles. My saviour (who would have guessed it) was Mrs MacMahon. They obeyed her like chicks do a mother hen. She had them queue up in my honour, by age. Each one was two inches taller than the next.

  ‘This is Mr Thomson,’ she announced. ‘Say hello to him.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Thomson!’ they said with in unison.

  ‘And from now on he will be living with us. Let’s welcome him.’

  ‘Welcome, Mr Thomson!’

  Then Mrs MacMahon and the children went out into the garden. It really wasn’t that strange at all, that this woman, who had wanted to be a governess all her life, was so happy in her new role as mother of a large family. Mr MacMahon took me with him.

  ‘Tommy, lad, come with me,’ he said. ‘I want to sho
w you the house. And I want you to meet someone.’

  MacMahon showed me the whole house and finally took me to the boarders’ parlour. Before opening the door he said, with the tone of a tourist guide, ‘Now you’ll meet Mr Modepà.’

  ‘Modepà?’

  Instead of answering, Mr MacMahon opened the door. It was a very large room, half library and half parlour. Sitting in an armchair, reading an illustrated magazine, there was a black man. When he saw us he stood up as if a devil had poked him in the arse. I was immediately suspicious of that reflexive act, and of the way he stood at attention like he was in the army. We shook hands. Yellow wormlike protuberances furrowed through the whites of his eyes. That spoke more clearly of his medical history than any clinical file. MacMahon said to me, ‘He doesn’t understand English.’ And addressing Mr Modepà and pointing at me with his finger he shouted, ‘Tommy! Tommy! Do you understand? He’s named Tommy!’

  MacMahon was one of those people who believe they can make up for the linguistic deficits of foreigners by shouting. The volume of his bellows was directly proportional to the lack of language skills the person he was talking to had, and hearing him I came to the conclusion that Mr Modepà didn’t know one word of English. Mr Modepà smiled.

  ‘The poor lad only speaks French,’ said MacMahon, excusing him.

  I pulled Mr MacMahon a few feet away to whisper confidentially into his ear, ‘Where did you get him from?’

  ‘From the same place I got you,’ was his surprising reply. ‘Like I told you, every day I went to the ruins of the boarding house to see if you were there. One day I saw him sitting right where I found you. I addressed him, but we didn’t understand each other. He just kept repeating his name: Modepà, Modepà. The next day I went back to the ruins and he was still there. And the day after. And the next. And finally I felt so sorry for him that I couldn’t help bringing him home.’