William was watching the scene with his hands on his head. The four Tectons still had their backs to them, absorbed in the landscape. Marcus was behind them, only a few feet away. And he wasn’t shooting.
William couldn’t take it anymore. He shouted, ‘Shoot, you damn gypsy! Shoot!’
William’s shouting alerted the four Tectons, who as one turned round.
Marcus pulled the trigger. But instead of a detonation, all he heard was an empty click. (Marcus would dream of that click on many nights.) William was the first to react. He fled back through the hole they had come from, on all fours and with the speed of a squirrel. Marcus pulled the trigger again.
The first bullet was lost above the Tecton city.
The second bullet killed a Tecton who was chasing after William.
The third bullet bounced off a rock, without hitting anyone.
The fourth bullet seriously wounded a Tecton in the neck.
The fifth entered another Tecton’s stomach, who fell over the precipice from the impact.
There was one Tecton left, the gorilla, who fell on Marcus like an avalanche of flesh.
He was the biggest, strongest Tecton, but he surprised Marcus by shrieking like an enraged child. He dragged Marcus towards the precipice, throttling him and beating his head against a rock the way a gorilla would open a coconut. And now we might legitimately ask ourselves: how is it possible that a short-legged little man, with his body destroyed by slavery, starving, gaunt and exhausted, could beat a muscular Tecton warrior, protected by stone armour and an expert in man-to-man combat?
Marcus, naturally, was unable to offer me any rational explanation. He could only describe images, guttural sounds and a vertigo unimaginable to our senses. But I ventured an answer.
It was very simple. The Tecton couldn’t kill Marcus because Marcus couldn’t die. He lived because he had a reason to live: to be with her again. Marcus didn’t die, in the end, because a man that has survived the Congo, the Craver brothers, the Tectons and that infernal underground journey cannot die when he is at the gates of salvation.
While the Tecton strangled him, Marcus kept his eyes fixed on those of his executioner. They fought at the edge of the landing. As the Tecton’s hands pulled him back by his neck, Marcus saw the city below him upside down. At any moment he would push him over.
Here Marcus’s memory suffered a lapse. He could only remember that, suddenly, the Tecton’s hands stopped throttling him. His attacker had covered his face with his hands, like someone who wants to save himself from an unpleasant sight. And he remembered pushing his adversary with both feet. When the Tecton realised that he was falling it was already too late.
Marcus spent a few moments wheezing like a runaway horse. Because of the lack of oxygen, his brain created some very amusing hallucinations. Everything was twisting and turning. He would have been perfectly capable of throwing himself over the cliff. Only chance made his body fall in the right direction, towards the stone, and not towards the abyss.
He noticed that his hand was smeared with a greasy substance. His asphyxiated brain wanted to make him believe that it was banana marmalade. When he had licked off the last drop of jam he noticed the Tectons that had gone over the edge, who were still falling. He also realised that the gorilla was shrieking and had no eyes in his face. His body left a trail of two red liquid strings. They were the streams of blood that gushed from his eye sockets. Marcus had ripped out the creature’s eyeballs with his desperate rat fingers and then he had devoured them. He stood up, very slowly. Only two bodies remained on the ledge. The Tecton he had wounded wasn’t moving, so he wasn’t certain if he was dead or alive. Just in case, he pushed him, as if he were rolling up a carpet, over the precipice. He was so exhausted, physically and mentally, that he didn’t have the strength to repeat the operation with the dead Tecton. He turned around and headed towards the tunnel, shouting, ‘William? William?’
He didn’t get any response. Probably William was still fleeing, and would continue to flee for much longer without stopping or looking back. That created problems. But of another dimension. And in those moments he didn’t want to think about them.
He glanced again at the void. The bodies were still falling through seemingly endless airspace, as if they were chasing each other in a deadly race. The city hadn’t moved. He didn’t have to worry about its inhabitants. Supposing that the three bodies didn’t disintegrate on the fall, supposing that the Tectons sent out a patrol, they would still take days, entire weeks to get to the landing. Gradually, as if he didn’t want to accept it, the vague idea that he could allow himself to rest began to take shape within him. He stretched out on the rock, nude, without taking his eyes off of the remaining Tecton. He was dead yet Marcus was still afraid of him.
He felt all the weight of the world on him; it was as if his shoulders were holding up all the stones that separated him from the surface. But he was a free man.
Sleep, Marcus Garvey, sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
MARCUS COULD BE COMPLETELY sure that he was the first human being that ever opened his eyes in a place like that one. The orange light of the Tecton world illuminated the landing with a stagnant peace. It was impossible to know how long he had been asleep, hours or just a few minutes.
It started to rain, as if the rain had been waiting for him to wake up. The clouds released some thick yellow drops that bombarded the landing furiously, like tiny watery meteorites. The raindrops soaked the stone of the landing and filled the open mouth of the rigid Tecton corpse. As they fell on the armour of the dead man, they bounced off with a metallic plop-plop-plop. In a few minutes Marcus was drenched, deliriously drenched. Suffering that extreme dehydration that affects men who have been fighting life-or- death battles, he knelt with his mouth open, drinking in all the water he could absorb through the pores of his body.
For a few seconds he felt as if the rain was washing his pain away like grime. He hadn’t felt so fresh, so powerful in a long time. Even the numerous scratches etched on his skin seemed shorter and thinner, more closed.
Water? Marcus stuck out both his hands. He looked closely at the drops that fell on his palms. They didn’t dilute and the yellow mineral reminded him of another, very familiar one: the gold that came out of the mine.
In the Tecton world it rained gold. When Marcus realised he spat it out. It was raining gold. But surprise gave way to pragmatism. Up until that moment he hadn’t gained anything from the mine’s gold. Why should he waste his time with this gold? He leapt over to the shells, and emptied the contents out onto the landing. The orange light illuminated everything, which he could finally look at without fear.
His fingers hadn’t played tricks on him. What a load of rubbish, thought Marcus. One of the shells was practically filled by three large objects: the tusk of a small elephant, a whole rubber plant and a rock the size of a pirate cannonball, with encrusted shiny specks. He made a disgusted face. For this he had been about to die, for this the Tectons had attacked an entire world! To take some animal teeth, a plant and a stone with them!
He continued rifling through the things, and in the second shell, a treasure appeared in the form of tins of beef and peaches in heavy syrup. And, mixed in with some peanuts, he found more bullets. Then he approached the dead Tecton. He took off his armour to reveal the padded tunic. Underneath his armour, the Tecton wore some sort of padded pyjama that was all one piece. Marcus settled on the tunic. He tried the armour on, but the stone scales pierced his skin. It dawned on him why the Tectons must wear those pyjamas, and he stripped all the clothes off the corpse.
The pyjama covered him and protected him from the roughness of that mosaic of little stones that was the Tecton armour. That felt better. In the inner part of the tunic Marcus found some side pockets, like little leather bags, that fell parallel to his armpits. And inside one of them, with a big ‘oh’ of surprise, he found a second revolver. He guessed that the Tecton had taken it with him as a souvenir, without unders
tanding the fatal possibilities it held.
He filled his pockets with the two revolvers, the bullets, the peanuts, and the tinned food. He took a few steps. At first he felt like a Catholic priest, or even like one of those young ladies from the eighteenth century who wore bell-shaped skirts. But if the Tectons went around in cassock-like clothing, he concluded, there must be a good reason for it. Then he stripped the dead Tecton of his footwear. He examined them and saw that the inner part of each boot was lined with a moss to muffle their steps. Carefully, he put on the left boot. Oh, Lord! What a pleasure to wear shoes again.
He went to the edge of the landing and gave the Tecton city one last glance. Nothing else in the world could be so sublime and so vile at the same time. Endless avenues. Perfect skyscrapers. And, what’s more, it rained gold. But the golden rain, thought Marcus, hadn’t made the Tectons any happier.
At first the armour was cumbersome, but he became accustomed to it very quickly. It was, more or less, like learning to ride a bicycle and row at the same time. He had to combine the momentum of his elbows and knees. And soon, his initial discomfort turned into enthusiasm.
The clothing was a miracle of rigidity and flexibility at the same time. It was infinitely lighter than iron armour, infinitely more resistant than any leather clothing. Moving through the cave with that armoured body was almost a pleasure. Marcus and the tunic strengthened their friendship as they advanced through the tunnel. One, two, one, two, he moved his elbows, hip, hop, hip, hop, he propelled himself with his knees. Since the inner pockets were below his armpits, what he carried there didn’t constrain him. One, two, one, two … hip, hop, hip, hop … He had tied a lantern to his neck, there were only two live worms of similar size left in the bag, and since it was soft it fell to one side of his neck and then the other like a glowing yoke. Go on, Marcus Garvey, keep going! Go back to the world! Don’t stop now!
Life moves at different speeds. And that trip back was a sigh. Thanks to the tunic and the strength that freedom brings, Marcus moved with prodigious drive. His one concern was William. When he got to the wall filled with holes, he shouted, ‘William!’
He stuck his head into all the tunnels.
‘William! William! William!’
Nothing.
He was glad William wasn’t around. but not knowing his location did not make him happy in the least. What was he up to?
When he got to the Sea of Young Ladies he tried again.
‘Wiilliiiiiaaam!’
There had never been such a solitary voice. A darkness without walls, a vast emptiness, inhabited by a compact mass of millions and millions of dead mussels.
His voice scattered through those desolate places, far, very far, dragged by an air so light it didn’t offer resistance to the sound or dilute it. The shout surrounded the columns and extended above that carpet of petrified crustaceans.
‘Wiilliiiiiaaam!’
Never had a voice produced so much solitude. Marcus knelt down. On the outward journey they had used the path. The trail that the caravan had left was still intact. In some spots, the softest ones, William and Marcus’s bare footprints could still be made out. But only in one direction.
Marcus imposed on himself a very strict routine. Two morsels of tinned meat each day, half a peach and one sip of the nectar. To sleep he took shelter at the foot of one of the columns. The wind whipped him much less than on the journey out. The armoured tunic was expansive, and he drew his arms into the sleeves. He pulled on a string that ran along the edge of the skirt, closing it from below as if it were a sleeping bag, imitating what he had seen the Tectons do.
One night he was awakened by a noise that had no distinguishable form or content. He couldn’t even say if it was the bellow of a hippopotamus or the bifid whisper of a snake. He heard a voice, a far off voice, saying, ‘Maaar … cuuus …’
And then an echo, which sent his name back broken, ‘–us! … –us! … –us!’
The shout was repeated on other occasions. Always unexpectedly and when he had just closed his eyes. He would wake up soaked in sweat, grab the two revolvers and wave them wildly into the darkness.
‘William?’ he asked, without lowering his weapons.
But beyond the small circle of weak green light from the lanterns he couldn’t see anything.
Did they really exist, those voices? Not even he himself was sure if he had really heard them, if he had dreamed them or just imagined them. In that mute underworld, where not even silence spoke, the border between dreams, delusions and reality blurred.
To free himself from these aural hallucinations, Marcus tried to think up a plan of action. But he was no strategist. He would get confused. He was alone and three Tectons remained on the surface. What could he do?
Manual work was the only activity that distracted him a little bit. During the rest periods, before sleeping, he looked for crustaceans to reconstruct the broken gun butt. He went off the narrow path and used the lantern to select the best shells. They were stuck into the earth as if covered by a layer of cement and he had to use a lot of force to extract them. On these excursions he acted like a caveman polishing flint arrowheads. It wasn’t easy for him to find a piece that fitted. But finally he found the perfect one. It slotted in perfectly and he allowed his hand to close around it. He made violent gestures with the hand that held the revolver, like a real Wild West gunman.
The next day he began to ascend the passageway that twisted and turned. When he wanted to sleep he wedged himself into one of the cracks in the earth, beside the path. He hid the lantern between his feet, under his skirt, so that the light wouldn’t give him away. He discovered that inside the lantern there was only one worm left. It had devoured the other one before they got to the surface. Marcus grew increasingly anxious, thinking about William.
That day Marcus looked back. From the heights of the passageway he seemed to see below, in the Sea of Young Ladies, there shone a little light. It was a small green bubble floating in the midst of the darkness. But it went out very quickly. Tectons following him? No, that was impossible. They would have taken weeks to organise an expedition, and even more to get from the city to the landing.
‘William!’ he shouted. No reply.
A mirage, then? His mind was divided. Until one fine day he said to himself: ‘Don’t be stupid, you needn’t be afraid of what’s around you, but rather of what awaits you.’
There were no more incidents. He entered the final crevasse, the one that led to the mine. He pushed along on his elbows and knees with the endurance of an athlete, and, even though it was very narrow, a few days later, before him, at the end of the tunnel, a weak white light appeared. He dragged himself towards the light slowly, making sure not to make any noise.
He put his face into one of the holes. A very small one. In fact, it was like sticking his head into the neck of a too-tight pullover. For a while Marcus just looked into the mine. Still, silent, attentive.
He reviewed his situation. Some place, very close by, there were three Tectons. But he had two pistols and the advantage of the element of surprise. There was nothing in the mine. The mine had been the scene of slave labour, of hate, of love. Of a battle. And now nothing could be seen there, nothing could be heard. The demolished wood beams were still there, where they had landed after the explosions. Someone had removed the corpses. And that was it. He could make out the remains of broken lamps, fragments of clothes, of useless things, as if the mine had turned into a rubbish dump.
Marcus hesitated. The Tectons were probably in the clearing. In order to attack them he would have to go inside the mine. While he was in there and as he climbed out of there – luckily the Tectons had left the ladder in place – he would be immensely vulnerable. The alternative was to look for some of the secondary offshoots that the Tectons had dug during their assault, which reached the surface in the area around the mine. That was how the Tectons had attacked them, from behind, and that would be a less risky manoeuvre.
But he so
on he discovered that that possibility had its risks as well. On the way down to the mine an indeterminate number of small underground corridors came together. Each one of the holes in the mine walls was, in fact, a natural canal. The Tectons had done a lot of digging to find the paths that would take them to the surface, work that united those secondary tunnels to each other. At first Marcus opted for following one of the small tunnels, hoping to find one of the exits that would take him to the clearing unobserved. From there he could peek out and observe the scene before attacking. But he got lost. And he was losing hope. The outskirts of the mine were filled with tunnels that went up and down, that turned to the left and to the right. He didn’t know if the underground labyrinth was leading him closer to the world or further from it. At one point he saw a small ray of light, in front of him, filtering through a stone pipe. Since that particular corridor headed upwards, Marcus thought that he would eventually emerge into the light of day. But he was wrong. He only managed to get to the mine through another tunnel.
Resigned, Marcus took a rest. He was watching the inside of the mine without thinking about anything in particular. Surprise: a bumblebee appeared who, bold or lost, had decided to investigate that uninhabited shaft. It was spinning around, then it got stirred up, and protested angrily with a buzz.
How lovely a bumblebee could be! Especially to someone who was returning from an underground experience that had taken him through extremes of pain and slavery. Marcus’s heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s. After sharing spaces with rocks and crustaceans that had been dead for millennia, that bumblebee brought him back in touch with the world.
He decided to take a risk. His body squeezed through the hole with short, decisive movements. And once he was in the mine, he went up the ladder as quickly and silently as he could.
When he got to the last few rungs he stuck his head out, up to the height of his eyes. At the southern end of the clearing, at the old camp, he saw a fire. One of the three Tectons, a very short individual, had the camp’s enormous pot on the boil. He was stirring the contents with a large spatula. Tecton number two was a very fat creature who lay placidly on the grass, beside the same pot. He was looking at the clouds with his fingers intertwined over his round belly. The only visible activity from that individual was concentrated at his mouth, which chewed on a long piece of straw, like a cow. Where was the third Tecton? He was nowhere to be seen.
Pandora in the Congo Page 26
