Pandora in the Congo

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  The Tecton dropped the fat worm down the deep black chasm to their right. Humans and Tectons queued up at the edge of the ravine.

  That faint, live green light sank into the darkness, twisting in silence. It fell, and fell, and kept falling. The worm’s form became smaller than a needle. Marcus couldn’t believe it: almost a minute had passed and the worm’s light hadn’t gone out. The Tectons gave the order to move off again. Marcus gave it a last glance, and he could still see a miniscule green dot falling and falling.

  After a few days the passageway emptied out into an unobstructed valley, a sea of solid magma. Marcus sensed a limitless flat plain where not even the green lights of the lanterns could be seen against the crimson of a severe, rippling sun, with capricious forms, as if waves of copper had covered a horde of crustaceans. All around them millions of shells, sharp as knives, emerged from the ground. In their bare feet they didn’t dare stray from a thin flat tongue of land that traversed the horizon. ‘Here the rocks bite,’ said Marcus to himself.

  The lanterns offered limited visibility. They couldn’t see the immense spaces, but they could hear them. In that desert a mute and violent wind blew that smacked the intruders in the face as if it were led by personal animosity. There was also another unusual phenomenon: the temperature lowered so far that it was even cold. They slept in the middle of nothing, and when they woke up their tortured skin was covered with some sort of dense dew. They were so hungry that they licked it. It was gelatine and tasted of celery and sulphur. According to William, the ceiling must have been so high up that it allowed the condensation of clouds of putrid gases.

  Marcus named that valley the Sea of Young Ladies, because here and there, along the road, appeared sinuous columns with thin waists, as if they had been compressed by a very tight corset. Some of the ‘young ladies’ were incommensurably large. They had a giant base that thinned as it went up, ten metres, fifty metres, a hundred metres, five hundred metres, and at that point got thicker again, more and more, until the form got lost up there, in a ceiling hidden by the most opaque darkness.

  ‘My God!’ said William, admiringly. ‘The ancients said that the world rested on a tortoise’s shell. But no one said what there was underneath the turtle. Now we know.’ He pointed to a few of the young ladies, ‘the pillars of the Earth.’

  They were the first men to step foot in that world. They did so as two beasts of burden and, at that point in the voyage, Marcus couldn’t take any more. That place made obvious to him the terrible injustice of only having five senses for pleasure and the entire surface of one’s body for pain. Marcus discovered that hell wasn’t a place, but a journey. He discovered that hell was coming to him as he went to it, and that the pain took the place of time.

  The real nightmare began when they woke up. As he heaved the shell onto his back, Marcus’s bones cracked like the walls of an old mansion. They had been eating no more than slices of bread and leaves. Their existence had been reduced to carrying that load, to putting one foot in front of the other. They didn’t have wounds, they were wounds. And Marcus had an added torture to bear: William.

  They had learned to speak without emitting hardly any sound. It was a language reminiscent of the one used by deaf-mutes, based more on the movements of their lips rather than sounds. It was no longer a dialogue, just a monologue from William: ‘Revolver! Find it!’

  At the end of each day, with all but one of the lanterns extinguished, William and Marcus pretended to sleep until the gorilla Tecton’s shift began. He soon started yawning. When those eyelids fell over his eyes like curtains, Marcus seized the moment. With all the strength of one hand, he raised up the shell an inch or two, imperceptibly, and with the other he felt around inside it. Nothing.

  William was right. It seemed that the Tectons had only gathered trinkets and trifles. His fingers rummaged through minutiae. A comb. Cups. Pipes. Stones. Tree branches. An old brush, some keys. A broken piece of glass that cut his hand badly … He was getting desperate.

  ‘Find it!’

  Without the Tecton noticing, William and Marcus switched the shells they used as pillows so that Marcus could search inside both of them. Worst of all, they had no guarantee that the Tectons had even taken a revolver. Everything his fingers touched was a trinket. Once or twice, the gorilla Tecton’s eyelids would move, opening rapidly, and he almost caught him with his hand in the shell.

  ‘Find it!’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Marcus, giving up on the third night. ‘The shells are too deep. I don’t have enough time to go through everything.’

  ‘You have to find it!’ insisted William.

  ‘Then you’ll have to keep him busy! I need time. I have to get my hand all the way inside. It’s the last chance we have.’

  ‘But if I distract him he’ll use the club on me,’ said William.

  ‘Either keep him busy or forget about finding a gun.’

  William grimaced.

  ‘Maybe you want to stick your hand in there?’ said Marcus. ‘Would you rather they caught you red-handed?’

  ‘Tonight,’ said William.

  * * *

  ‘Now!’ said Marcus, and William jumped.

  The gorilla couldn’t believe it. The human was coming towards him, gesticulating and addressing him with a voice of authority.

  ‘I am very sorry, Mr Smith!’ shouted William. ‘I have to tell you that the bank transfer is invalid, it didn’t arrive at its destination!’

  The other Tectons woke up. They brandished their clubs, but they didn’t attack him. William’s approach was so suicidal that they suspected some hidden trick. They surrounded him, watching suspiciously. Marcus took advantage of the opportunity to move his fingers frantically inside the shell.

  ‘I swear to you that it’s not my signature, Mr Smith!’ continued William. ‘I don’t know who deposited a transfer of two hundred thousand pounds into a bank account in my name, Mr Smith!’

  The revolver, the revolver, Marcus’s fingers urged, moving quicker than a pickpocket’s. Where is it, where is it? It wasn’t there. The Tectons had decided that William’s behaviour had no hidden dangers. They jumped on him from all sides, all four at once. Marcus cried tears of rage. Where is it, where is it?

  ‘Don’t get the police involved, Mr Smith!’ screamed William as he received blows with clubs and kicks. ‘My father will sort it all out, Mr Smith!’

  The Tectons laughed. Beating up William had gone from being an act of repression to becoming a source of entertainment. Marcus’s tears were so bitter they burned his face. His fingers now moved more out of nervous impulse than by his wilful control.

  ‘My God!’ he suddenly realised. ‘It’s the revolver, it’s always been here.’ All those nights he had been fumbling for the shape of a revolver. But the object that he now held didn’t have the butt or the trigger protector. Marcus hadn’t associated that mutilated weapon with the object he was looking for. But there it was: a revolver with the butt removed.

  The Tectons threw William down beside Marcus like a sack of potatoes and forgot about him. He was a pitiful sight. His nose gushed blood and his right eye was swollen like a small tyre. But Marcus had the best medicine in the world. He turned his hand. And in the palm, with the barrel along his forearm, appeared the revolver he had wanted so badly. William whispered: ‘Thank the good Lord. Give it to me!’ he said, stretching out his hand. ‘Those bastards … I’ll kill them right now!’

  Marcus was about to hand it over obediently. All of a sudden, though, an invisible light passed through his mind. In a particle of a second he vividly remembered Amgam’s last kiss. And he knew that their public embrace had had a purpose beyond displaying her love: to distract the Tectons’ attention while she hid the revolver and the bullets in the shell he had been carrying since the first day. It was quite possible, in fact, that Amgam herself had taken off the butt so that she could hide it in the shell.

  The revolver belonged to him. It was his only hope.

 
; William and Marcus were so close to one another that their noses touched. Marcus hid his arm. He wouldn’t give him the revolver. Never. William opened his mouth, shocked. Marcus turned his back on him.

  ‘The revolver, you idiot!’ said William, lips clenched, pulling Marcus by the shoulder and then hitting him cruelly in the ribs.

  But Marcus jammed an elbow behind him, violently, until he hit a soft stomach. The blow knocked the breath out of William. And after the beating he had received he was in no condition to argue.

  William understood that he was up against a revolt. Because Amgam’s gift began to achieve exactly what it set out to do: to liberate Marcus. It began to free him from chains that were much heavier than the Tecton enslavement. The submissive relationship that tied Marcus the stableboy to William the aristocrat no longer existed. If Marcus had only found a gun, nothing would have changed. But that weapon was much more. It was a fork in the road of destiny that forced him to choose between being stableboy Marcus or free Marcus. And Marcus knew one certain thing: that as long as he was breathing, as long as he was alive, he would never turn Amgam’s love over to William Craver. Never.

  The next day William began a new strategy. He knew that Marcus was stubborn. He also knew that he was more tired, so he opted to wear him down.

  ‘The revolver! Give it to me!’ he whispered into his ear the following night. ‘You’re a stableboy! The only thing you’ve done in this life is clean horse’s arses and boil pots. How do you expect to challenge four Tectons?’

  Marcus couldn’t take refuge in sleep. It was highly likely that William would steal the gun from him as he slept. It seemed to him that William was sleeping, that he had taken a break from that peculiar conflict in order to recoup his strength. But how could he be sure? And, so, he had to stay up all night long.

  They resumed their march. Marcus hadn’t had a moment’s rest. The shell weighed double on him. For a few days now the ceiling had begun to loom again, falling onto their heads. But it wasn’t yet low enough that they had to crawl, pushing the shell, which would have made the load a little less heavy.

  ‘The revolver!’ insisted William at night. ‘You don’t know how to shoot! Your hand will shake! Give it to me! Don’t you want to get out of here? Have you gone crazy, Marcus, completely crazy?’

  But the only response he got from Marcus was that he pressed the weapon tighter against his stomach.

  The next day they had to walk bent over. It was as if they were following the route of a funnel, the space that surrounded them narrowed in only one direction. Now they had to move forward with their bodies folded into an L-shape. William was losing hope. If they started to crawl again he wouldn’t be able to steal the weapon. He couldn’t believe it. He had five bullets in the palm of his hand, five. Enough ammunition to eliminate four Tectons. And that idiot Garvey was hiding a perfectly serviceable revolver from him. It got to the point where William could no longer control himself. He threw himself onto Marcus’s back, making him fall. Marcus had the shell on top of him and on top of that an enraged William straddling the makeshift saddle, beating his fists furiously against his skull.

  ‘The revolver! Give me the revolver, you bastard! Give it to me! They’ll kill us!’

  Marcus didn’t even have the strength to get up, much less fight back. He could only cover his head with one arm, while with the other he hid the revolver against his belly button. He was saved, paradoxically, by the Tectons themselves. They attacked William with their clubs. They beat him on the head and ribs, and when he fell they continued hitting him for some time.

  At night they lay down again together. William cried out of frustration, and he whispered, ‘Gypsy bastard … you … you’ve taken us beyond death …’

  Marcus just said, ‘Sleep, William, sleep.’

  And then, without warning, Marcus Garvey’s last day underground arrived. And it was, according to Marcus, the closest to the end of the world that a human being can experience.

  The stone funnel shrank more and more. Soon they were forced to slither like lizards, exactly like the first few days of their immersion into the underworld. And just as in those first days, the Englishmen advanced with escorts, two Tectons in front of Marcus and two behind William.

  The Tectons were anxious to move faster now. But Marcus couldn’t move, the shell itself had become a plug that stopped up the tunnel. He shouted. He needed the help of the Tectons in front of him, who eventually widened the cave with their clubs.

  As a crack between the cave and the shell opened, a fierce wind attacked Marcus’s face. Strong gusts, so strong they hurt his eyes. The wind was nothing like the air in the Sea of Young Ladies, silent and dry. This wind was cold, and was accompanied by a mechanical and furious whistle. And something more unusual: light. An unnatural light, orange in colour. The Tectons widened the breach, and through it filtered rays of light that pierced the eyes.

  But what Marcus least expected was that, after going through that bottleneck, the cave would open out onto a landing, with open sky. The light bathing the landing was so intense that it burned his eyes. Marcus crawled on his knees and elbows, covering his eyes with his hands. He opened two fingers and saw William’s head.

  ‘Close your eyes!’ he warned him.

  The orange light dominated everything. The excess of light didn’t bother the Tectons’ cat eyes, but it was lethal to the eyes of men who had spent so much time being guided by lanterns made of green worms.

  The two Tectons following William pushed him brutally. They were impatient to arrive at the landing. They jumped over the human and left him behind. For a few long seconds William and Marcus lay together on their sides, blinking in pain. Then Marcus slowly opened his eyes.

  The landing was shaped like one of those mushrooms that grow on tree bark. The four Tectons were standing up on the edge of the landing, with their backs to the Englishmen. What were they looking at? Some hidden landscape? Beyond the stone mushroom there was nothing, nothing, just a void, a desert of air. He looked up. The ceiling must have been so, so far above that they only saw dark violet clouds. Inside the clouds, red lightning bolts chased each other furiously while thunderclaps rumbled like lions fighting. The Tectons were looking at something below them. He crawled to the edge of the mushroom keeping as far away from the boots of the Tectons as he could, and looked down. A hiccup emptied his lungs.

  From that landing there was a magnificent view of the Tectons’ city. The stone landing was so far up, or the city so far below, that Marcus felt like someone looking at the world from the moon. But the metropolis was so unbelievably huge that the height didn’t lessen the visibility. Actually it was more the opposite, as if the city was proud of its vastness, of being visible from so far up.

  Some of the avenues must have been a hundred miles long. Parts of the Tecton city followed a perfect geometric design. In other places the buildings were squeezed together any which way, and the tallest skyscrapers must have exceeded the highest peak on Earth. Marcus wasn’t sure if the city was in the most utter chaos or the most perfect order. As far as his eyes could see there rose buildings of marble and coal, marble and coal, marble and coal, as if the two materials were engaged in an undecided, perpetual war. And he thought that the Congo could be bigger than God, yes, but that the Tecton metropolis would always be bigger than the Congo.

  William imitated Marcus. And when he saw the city he wheezed like an overloaded donkey.

  It was there, at the very gates of hell, where Marcus Garvey redeemed himself for all the impure acts he had committed in the Congo. The wind, with an incredibly violence, pushed the two Englishmen’s eyes into their sockets. But while William’s skin moved like the clothes on a scarecrow, the only thing that shifted on Marcus was his hair, wild from the slavery. The rest of his body was a human rock that stuck out its hand and demanded, in a tone that did not leave room for discussion, ‘The bullets.’

  That open hand was the exact opposite of the hand that had once accepted sticks
of dynamite. It was another man’s hand, because the Marcus Garvey that had arrived in the Congo no longer had anything to do with the Marcus Garvey that had arrived at the Tecton metropolis.

  William yielded. He wanted to give him the ammunition, but he couldn’t. He had crushed the bullets inside his closed fist for too many days, too tightly. Now his fingers refused to open, like the lid of a rusty chest.

  ‘The bullets!’ shouted Marcus, aware that the Tectons wouldn’t stand there gaping much longer.

  He forced open William’s closed fingers, one by one. When he had opened his hand, Marcus couldn’t help being shocked: the bullets had made wounds that were stigmata. He couldn’t waste time. He had to load the five bullets into the chamber, and it was much more difficult than it seemed.

  Marcus got onto his knees. He thought it would be easier to handle the revolver that way. No. His fingers shook so much that the bullets jumped like tiny live fish. And the wind. He couldn’t get even one bullet into the chamber. Not even one. All five tumbled down onto the ground.

  It was beyond him. He spent a second, an eternity, telling himself, ‘For the love of God, breathe, think, get a hold of yourself!’ But suddenly he changed his mind. He said to himself, ‘Don’t breathe, don’t think, let your fingers do the work. They already know what they have to do.’

  Somehow he managed to load a bullet. And the feeling of the projectile going into the chamber, the mechanical sliding of that small cylinder, encouraged his fingers, and they repeated the success with another bullet, and another, and another, and another, and finally he had the five bullets inside the chamber. He pulled back the hammer and took aim at the Tectons.