Marcus went closer. Out in the open, aiming at the two Tectons. He advanced step by step, without hiding himself. He was incredibly close to the two Tectons and they still hadn’t seen him. The small one kept stirring the pot, engrossed in his task. The fat one daydreamed, watching the shapes of the clouds.
Both of Marcus’s arms were rigid, a revolver in each hand. He was thirty paces from the pot. Twenty, ten. And the Tectons still didn’t react. Not even in his wildest fantasies could he have foreseen something like that. He was convinced that as soon as he came out of the mine, they would attack him from three sides at once, that they would follow a perfectly coordinated military strategy. But no. A strange unease overtook Marcus. The Tecton cook was still focused on keeping the pot boiling; the other, spellbound by the clouds. In the end he was compelled to announce his presence. And the only thing he could think of was to say, ‘Hello.’
The cook suffered a hand spasm. He dropped the spatula, his lower jaw opened as if it were thrown out of joint. He raised his arms in a sign of surrender. The other one acted with more composure. He sat up and, seeing the threat, slipped a discreet hands toward the club that hung from his belt. But Marcus aimed right at his face with one of the revolvers, as if to say, ‘I wouldn’t.’
The Tecton obeyed, against his will. And there was a strange pause. The one who’s threatening always has to take the lead. But Marcus had no idea of how to proceed. He was incapable of killing them in cold blood. Time stood still. The Tecton cook’s hands trembled. The fat one sensed Marcus’s weakness, but wasn’t able to act on it.
Marcus might not have shot, if it wasn’t for the appearance, right at that moment, of the third. He was coming out of William’s tent. It was the thin, tall officer that had captured him (that now seemed very, very long ago). Beneath his armour one could make out his long legs, with which he advanced decisively. He approached the pot, barking orders in a presumptuous and forceful tone, until he saw Marcus. He stopped shouting. He looked at Marcus with eyes closer to a rat’s than to a cat’s, small, black and hateful. When he had come out of the tent the Tecton had left the canvas door partly open. Through that crack Marcus could see Amgam inside, with her hands tied to one of the poles.
And now a short interlude to ask ourselves this question: were those three Tectons physically as Marcus described them to me? One as tall and thin as William? The other as fat and brawny as Richard? And the third, was he really a small cook who was subordinate to the other two? According to Marcus’s words (my notes, very persistent in that aspect, didn’t lie), that’s exactly how they were. But I came to the conclusion that memory must be a very malleable thing, and that it had adapted itself around a core of truth: that Marcus Garvey’s adventure was, in essence, a purifying epic journey, and that eliminating those three beings was the last step to becoming another man.
Seeing Amgam enraged Marcus. He aimed the two revolvers at the tall Tecton who, with impressively cold blood, shouted out an order. The other two jumped up. Marcus shot both of the revolvers into the chest of the leader. Even so, if the other two hadn’t moved, perhaps nothing else would have happened. But movement incites shooters. The daydreamer attacked with his club, and the cook pulled the enormous spatula out of the pot to use it as a weapon.
Marcus shot wildly at the three bodies. At that distance it was impossible for him to miss. The Tectons fell, wounded, but they got back up and tried to attack again. Marcus shot and shot, until the revolvers just went click, click, click, and it wasn’t until many clicks later that he realised that the three Tectons were dead.
It was all over. But he wasn’t flooded with happiness. Quite the opposite. He sensed a vague fear, an uneasiness that moved within him like fog over a burnt forest. The leader had fallen dead with his face to the ground, as if he had wanted to go back to his world before dying. The cook looked like a dog run over by a car. And the fat one had fallen into the pot. Half of his body was inside, with his feet hanging out.
Marcus let his weapons fall. He couldn’t take his eyes off the smoking barrels until he heard Amgam’s voice. He ran to the tent, knelt down and freed her. Still on his knees, Marcus began to cry. It was more of a haemorrhaging of tears than a real cry.
I would have liked to be there to see that moment. Without envy, just for the pleasure of witnessing a joyous moment, a joyous moment par excellence. Amgam was still dressed in William’s clothes, looking at him without quite believing it was him, that he had come back. Marcus was dressed in the filthy Tecton armour, covering his face with his hands to hide his tears. She moved closer to him, extended her hand and touched his cheek with one finger. He looked up, wiped his damp eyes with his dirty hands, looked at the clearing, looked at the dead bodies, looked at the mine, and when he looked at her it was as if he were awakening from a long nightmare, the longest of nightmares. You are you, and I am here, they said to each other, and it’s all over.
There was no passionate kiss. Instead they embraced like two lost children that have found each other again. Marcus took off the tunic and the pyjama. She saw all his wounds and she also undressed, tearing away William’s clothes.
Here Marcus had a wild impulse. Maybe he believed that the world owed him something, after having overcome such pain. And, carrying out poetic justice in the name of all the slaves in the world, he seized one of those odious bottles of champagne. One of the big bottles, five gallons of hot French champagne. Then she grabbed him by the hand and they ran. They reached the edge of the clearing and they kept running, into the jungle. Where was Amgam taking him? Nowhere. They were just running from the clearing with their fingers intertwined. The branches slashed their faces and bodies, but the pain didn’t hurt them. Marcus even liked it. It was a sharp pain, not a pain that repressed life, a very different pain from the one he had experienced underground.
It’s impossible to know how long they ran through the jungle. Finally Marcus stumbled on a wall of grass that blocked their way and he let himself fall. They rested right there, stretched out on the carpet of grass. They panted and laughed at the same time. They were in some remote, humid part of the jungle. The ceiling of green protected them from the tropical strength of the sun. After a little while Marcus realised that they had ended up in a very strange place.
The wall of grass that had stopped them was much more dense than it appeared. With both hands he removed the first layer of vegetation. He soon discovered that all that green was just a curtain. Behind it hid a wall of wood. He realised that the wall was the base of a tree, an immense tree. He tried to go around the perimeter, but he couldn’t. Branches, thorns and thickets kept him from penetrating. The jungle, jealous, wanted to be the only one to shelter the feet of the giant in its arms. But more than actually seeing, he could sense that the wall of wood went on and on, and he couldn’t even make out where its contours ended. If the tree’s base was so vast, how high must it be? Marcus realised that he had stumbled upon a wonder of nature.
He began his ascent. Amgam didn’t understand.
‘Come on!’ said Marcus, gesturing to her with his hand.
And she followed him. At first Marcus set the pace, clearing the way through the lattice of tropical creepers that, like them, climbed up the trunk. But Amgam soon overtook him. Cave dwelling and climbing must be similar arts. Perhaps it was that for that woman, who had gone beyond the heavens of the Tecton world, the top of a tree, no matter how big it was, was just a small step. Or perhaps it was, simply, that Amgam wasn’t meant to have anyone setting the pace for her. Amgam’s twelve fingers clung to the bark better than any ape’s could, and, what’s more, she had a special talent for finding places to shore herself up.
‘Wait!’ shouted Marcus, who was getting left behind.
And since she didn’t pay him any attention he had to shout even louder.
‘Wait!’
Amgam turned her head. Marcus raised the hand that held the bottle of champagne to make her understand that he was having trouble climbing with just one han
d. She clicked her tongue, as if to say, ‘Oh, that’s it!’ She came back, took the bottle from him and began climbing as fast, if not faster than before. She looked like a white spider.
The first part of the trajectory was relatively easy due to the vegetation that clung to the bark. An amalgam of tropical creepers, climbing plants and branches of nearby trees. Like the hands of a thousand religious faithfuls content to gaze toward the feet of their idol. But when they had gone beyond the jungle’s ceiling of vegetation the ascent became more difficult. The trunk was solid, smooth, and very upright, rising with a pride more appropriate to a Babylonian tower than to a work of nature. Now they began to appreciate the size of the creature they had taken on. The exact dimensions? When I asked Marcus to compare it to Big Ben, he almost died laughing.
They stopped at the first branch. It was an enormous lateral projection, as firm as a ship’s figurehead. Amgam was saying things. She expressed herself with joyful enthusiasm, speaking faster and more excitedly than ever. Most likely she had just grasped that the tree wasn’t a mountain of dead wood, that it was a living being filled with living beings. Marcus had never seen Amgam’s feline eyes so wide. But physically he was beaten. The underground adventures had consumed all his reserves. The momentum of willpower that had forced him through all the pain, all the endurance tests, had finally run out. His legs were shaking violently. She held him and whispered sweet nothings in her Tecton language. But Marcus freed himself from her embrace as if it were an insult.
‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘Higher, higher.’
And, so, the two naked bodies continued climbing the tree. He with every muscle in his arms and legs complaining with each movement he made, and she carrying the bottle of champagne. (It was useless for me to ask why they carried that damn bottle. They didn’t know why they were carrying it just as they didn’t know why they were climbing that tree.) Amgam knew how to find the smallest openings in the trunk. Frequently, she stopped to help Marcus with one hand, grabbing him under the arms. How many feet must they have climbed? Three hundred? Six hundred? Finally they arrived at the top, a small comfortable landing, a soft moss-covered hollow in the wood. Above them there was only a thin parasol of leaves. When Marcus had regained his breath he said only one word.
‘Look.’
Tree, trees, and trees. Amgam inhaled. She filled her lungs with such force that Marcus got scared. All the oxygen in the Congo entered that body, which was created to breathe a very different type of air.
She said something.
‘Yes, I know,’ confirmed Marcus. ‘No Pepe, no champagne. Congo.’
Marcus had already seen that immense jungle from a similar vantage point, on the expedition there. And he hadn’t found it appealing at all. Quite the opposite. What was the difference? Marcus saw that Amgam moved her eyes upwards, fixing them on the tropical sun. He wanted to put a hand in front of her face to make her understand that the sun could hurt her. But at that moment he remembered the feline nature of Amgam’s eyes. In the darkness her pupils dilated as wide as they could, filling her entire eye like an eclipsed sun, and now they shrank until they became a single vertical line.
Once again: what was it that made the Congo such a wonderful place? Marcus realised that the difference wasn’t in the landscape, but rather in him. The beauty of the landscape, now, came from the fact that he was no longer the same.
Later, they lay on that wooden bed with its moss mattress. For a few seconds Marcus held up the bottle of champagne, looking at it fixedly, incredulous. He no longer remembered why he had brought it with him.
In the book I wrote that Marcus had offered the bottle to Amgam. Her curiosity aroused, she had taken the bottle, until she heard Marcus say ‘champagne’. At that moment she had hurled it from the tree, angered by all the horrors that the word had conjured up. That’s how I wrote the original version. But I admit that Marcus’s account was quite different. In that particular passage I let myself get carried away, as much by hyperbole as by my passion for Amgam. Much later I realised the discord between the text and what I had written down at the prison. In order to free myself from my feelings and from the book, I decided to reproduce Marcus’s exact words. So, in the third edition, I wanted to fix the paragraph. But the editor told me not to touch it, that turning Amgam into a champagne guzzler wasn’t going to make the book any better. That was in the 1920s, in the midst of Prohibition, and the London publishing house had strong commercial ties with the United States, where they hoped to sell many copies. Later, in the fifth edition, I insisted on revising the error. But I had sold the rights to the book to another publishing house, which also begged me not to alter the passage. The new editor was a big advocate of symbolic literature and he alleged that we had to keep Amgam’s gesture: the heroine rebelling against humans and Tectons, against corrupt civilisation as represented by a bottle of champagne. I settled. In the 1960s a new publisher rescued the book from the oblivion into which it had almost completely fallen. He also asked me not to touch that paragraph about the champagne. Environmentalism was in style, and Amgam’s rejection of such a decadent drink as champagne was a representation of the couple’s integration into a natural environment and blah, blah, blah. In the last edition that was published, finally, the editor was a woman. Her opinion was that a liberated woman had to break the champagne bottle into a million pieces, since in the narrative structure the word ‘champagne’ had become synonymous with the patriarchal order. In short, in sixty years I have been unable to change that fragment to match the notes dictated by Marcus Garvey. Now, finally, I will.
Marcus’s version, Marcus Garvey’s bloody version, was that the couple got drunk on the five-gallon bottle of champagne. That is what Garvey originally told me, damn it. And that’s all.
TWENTY-FOUR
DO I HAVE TO say that I was the one who climbed to the top of that tree? At that point in the history I completely identified with Marcus Garvey.
Not even the best writer in the world could describe the force that united Marcus and Amgam. To say that they were happy would be stating the obvious. It would be like a naturalist informing us that butterflies and beetles are insects. Fabulous. But we’d continue to ignore the most marvellous secret in nature: the impulse that could turn a butterfly and a beetle into lovers.
Since I knew I was incapable of portraying Marcus and Amgam’s inner life, in the book I decided to limit myself to recounting what they lived through up on the landing of that tree. Obviously, the moral censorship of the period only allowed me monstrous ellipses. Because, what is it that Amgam and Marcus were doing at the top of that tree? Making love, all day long, without pausing or resting. Now, six decades later, I find myself with an almost opposite problem: describing sexual acrobatics doesn’t add any literary value and from my point of view literature has already covered, some time ago, the entire range of human emotions. Which is to say, that whatever I write I won’t be original, so I’ll just sum it up in three words and to hell with it: they were fucking.
Put two naked bodies up at the top of a tree, let them love each other, let them do things. While Marcus hugged her it seemed like Amgam had no bones, she was inhumanly lissom. And, yet, when that same body passed a certain limit of pleasure, it exploded like a wooden board breaking. In the surrounding trees, far below them, there was a horde of monkeys. The couple’s moans excited them, or angered them, or both things at once, as happens with flocks of puritanical old ladies, and they replied with shrill squawks in a thousand different tones.
Even the rain adapted itself to the two lovers. If it rained while they were making love, the rain excited them even more. If it rained after they made love, the water washed them clean. Some drops had a prodigious size and density, and as they fell onto their bodies they were like thick lips sucking at their skin. When they were worn out they slept clutching each other, his chest against her back, or the other way around, joined together like two matching spoons.
The storms in Africa make the ligh
tning in Europe seem like flickering, effeminate match flames. In the Congo not even the most timid bolts of lightning can be ignored. The emphatic outbursts demand your attention, be it day or night, eyes open or closed. When lightning struck and they had their eyes open, night became day. When they had them closed, behind their lids the blackness was assaulted by a yellow brightness, and that light reminded them that just closing your eyes wasn’t enough to erase the world. They didn’t sleep, in fact; a tenuous veil separated day from night. In the Congo Marcus learned a lesson that civilised life refuses to accept: that between sleep and wakefulness there isn’t a clear border. If sleep were the sea and wakefulness terra firma, they lived on the beach. That, and the diet of fruits from the tree, altered their senses. Especially his. Sometimes it seemed that if he touched Amgam with one finger he would make her burst like a soap bubble. Other times, she was the only reality in the world, more tangible than the Congo, closer to him than his own body.
While he was up in the tree Marcus only managed to come up with one thought, just one: that all his life had had one purpose, one and only one: to get to the top of that tree, with her.
Either the world is imperfect or perfection is finite, because one day Marcus decided to destroy that paradise, by climbing down from the tree. Amgam didn’t oppose him. She knew before Marcus what Marcus knew.
Can a single man save the world? I think, more likely, that it is the world that decides to save itself through a man. Until that moment the Tectons had only had fragmentary news from the surface. The Tecton command must have been awaiting the return of the military expedition. If they didn’t return, sooner or later they would send another one. Between the humans’ world and the Tectons’ there was still an open channel. And Marcus was the only one that knew what that meant. Could he stay up there atop that tree forever while the Tecton army was preparing to invade the world? Marcus had seen the Tecton metropolis, more extensive and powerful than a thousand Londons. First they would take the Congo. And then? Where would their ambition stop? At the Great Wall of China? The Suez Canal, or the Panama Canal? Maybe the English Channel? No. The Tectons were like termites. Technologically, in some aspects perhaps they were behind them. But in others, certainly, they were more advanced. The Tectons had reached the Congo and humans didn’t even suspect their existence. They would soon learn to copy humanity’s most destructive instruments and would likely improve on them. How many soldiers could inundate the surface? A million? Ten million? One hundred million? Marcus had endured the Tecton regime. He didn’t want to imagine what applying it on a universal scale would mean.
Pandora in the Congo Page 27
