The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When, at dawn, Roger asked him whether it was possible for a layman like him, who had never been very religious, to work in one of the missions that the Baptist Church had in the region of the Lower and Middle Congo, Theodore Horte gave a little laugh:

  “It must be one of God’s jokes,” he exclaimed. “The Bentleys, at the Ngombe Lutete mission, need a lay assistant to give them a hand with bookkeeping. And now you ask me that question. Isn’t this something more than mere coincidence? One of those jokes God plays on us sometimes to remind us that He’s always there and we should never despair?”

  Roger’s work from January to March of 1889, at the Ngombe Lutete mission, though short-lived, was intense, and it allowed him to leave behind the uncertainty in which he had lived for some time. He earned only ten pounds a month and with that he had to pay his room and board, but seeing William Holman Bentley and his wife work from morning to night with so much energy and conviction, and sharing with them life in the mission that was not only a religious center but a dispensary, a site for vaccinations, a school, a store for merchandise, and a place of recreation, counseling, and advice, made the colonial adventure seem less harsh, more reasonable, even civilizing. This feeling was encouraged by seeing how around this couple a small African community of converts to the reformed church had arisen who, in their attire and the songs the choir rehearsed every day for Sunday services, as well as in classes in literacy and Christian doctrine, seemed to be leaving tribal life behind and beginning a modern, Christian life.

  His work was not limited to keeping the books of income and expenses for the mission. That took him little time. He did everything, from removing excess foliage and weeding the small cleared space around the mission—it was a daily struggle against vegetation determined to recover the clearing that had been snatched away—to going out to hunt down a leopard that was eating the fowl in the yard. He took care of transport by trail or by river in a small boat, fetching and carrying the sick, tools, and workers, and he watched over the operations of the mission store, where natives in the vicinity could sell and acquire goods. This was done principally by barter, but Belgian francs and pounds sterling also circulated. The Bentleys laughed at his ineptitude in business and his vocation for prodigality, for Roger thought all the prices were high and wanted to lower them, even though that would deprive the mission of the small profit margin that allowed it to supplement its meager budget.

  In spite of the affection he came to feel for the Bentleys and the clear conscience he had working at their side, Roger knew from the beginning that his stay at the Ngombe Lutete mission would be temporary. The work was honorable and altruistic but made sense only if accompanied by the faith that animated Theodore Horte and the Bentleys and that he lacked, though he might mimic its gestures and manifestations, attending the commented readings of the Bible, the classes on doctrine, and the Sunday service. He wasn’t an atheist or an agnostic but something more uncertain, an indifferent man who did not deny the existence of God—the “first principle”—but was incapable of feeling comfortable in the bosom of a church, in common cause and joined with other believers, part of a common denominator. He tried to explain this to Theodore Horte during their long conversation in Matadi and felt clumsy and confused. The former naval officer calmed him: “I understand perfectly, Roger. God has His ways. He makes us uneasy, disturbs us, urges us to search. Until one day everything is illuminated and there He is. It will happen to you, you’ll see.”

  In those three months, at least, it hadn’t happened to him. Now, in 1902, thirteen years later, he still felt religious uncertainty. The fevers had passed, he had lost a good deal of weight, and though at times his weakness made him dizzy, he had resumed his duties as consul in Boma. He went to visit the governor-general and other authorities. He returned to the games of chess and bridge. The rainy season was at its height and would last for many more months.

  At the end of March 1889, when he finished his contract with Reverend William Holman Bentley and after five years away, he returned to Britain for the first time.

  V

  “Coming here has been one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life,” said Alice by way of greeting, pressing his hand. “I thought I’d never manage it. But here I am at last.”

  Alice Stopford Green maintained the appearance of a cold, rational person, far removed from sentimentality, but Roger knew her well enough to understand that she was moved to the marrow of her bones. He noticed the very slight tremor in her voice she could not hide and the rapid quivering of her nose that appeared whenever something worried her. She was close to seventy but still had her youthful figure. Wrinkles had not erased the freshness of her freckled face or the luminosity of her bright, steely eyes. In them the light of intelligence always shone. With her usual sober elegance, she wore a light suit, thin blouse, and boots with high heels.

  “What a pleasure, my dear Alice, what a pleasure,” Roger repeated, taking both her hands. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I brought you books, sweets, and some clothes but the constables at the entrance took everything away.” Her expression showed impotence. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes,” Roger said eagerly. “You’ve done so much for me all this time. Is there no news yet?”

  “The cabinet meets on Thursday,” she said. “I know from a good source that this matter is at the top of the agenda. We’re doing everything possible and even the impossible, Roger. The petition has close to fifty signatures, all of them important people. Scientists, artists, writers, politicians. John Devoy assures us that anytime now the telegram from the president of the United States ought to reach the British government. All our friends have mobilized to stop, well, I mean, to counteract the vile campaign in the press. You know about it, don’t you?”

  “Vaguely,” said Roger with a look of displeasure. “We don’t get news from outside and the jailers have orders not to say a word to me. The sheriff speaks, but only to insult me. Do you think there’s still a possibility, Alice?”

  “Of course I do,” she affirmed forcefully, but Roger thought it was a compassionate lie. “All my friends assure me the cabinet decides this unanimously. If a single minister opposes the execution, you’re saved. And it seems your former superior at the Foreign Office, Sir Edward Grey, is against it. Don’t lose hope, Roger.”

  This time the sheriff of Pentonville Prison was not in the visitors’ room. Only a very young, discreet guard who turned his back on them and looked at the corridor through the grating in the door, pretending disinterest in their conversation. If all the jailers at Pentonville were this considerate, life here would be much more bearable, he thought, and realized he still hadn’t asked Alice about events in Dublin.

  “I know that when the Easter Week Rising broke out, Scotland Yard went to search your house on Grosvenor Road,” he said. “Poor Alice, did they make things hard for you?”

  “Not too bad, Roger. They took a good number of papers. Personal letters, manuscripts. I hope they return them. I don’t think the papers will do them any good,” she said with a sigh, distressed. “Compared to what they’ve suffered in Ireland, what happened to me was nothing.”

  Would the harsh repression continue? Roger made an effort not to think about the shootings, the dead, the aftermath of that tragic week. But Alice must have read in his eyes his curiosity to know about it.

  “The executions have stopped, apparently,” she murmured, looking quickly at the guard’s back. “We estimate there are thirty-five hundred prisoners. Most have been brought here and are distributed in prisons all across England. We’ve found eighty women among them. Several associations are helping us. Many English lawyers have offered to take their cases, free of charge.”

  Questions pounded in Roger’s head. How many of his friends were among the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned? But he controlled himself. Why find out things he could do nothing about that would only increase his bitterness?

&nbs
p; “Do you know something, Alice? One of the reasons I’d like them to commute my sentence is because if they don’t, I’ll die without having learned Irish. If they do commute it, I’ll delve deep into it and I promise that in this very visitors’ room you and I will talk one day in Gaelic.”

  She nodded with a little smile that was only half there.

  “Gaelic is a difficult language,” she said, patting his arm. “You need a good deal of time and patience to learn it. You’ve had a very agitated life, my dear. But take comfort, few Irishmen have done as much for Ireland as you.”

  “Thanks to you, my dear Alice. I owe you so much. Your friendship, hospitality, intelligence, and culture, those Tuesday get-togethers on Grosvenor Road, the extraordinary people, the pleasant atmosphere, are the best memories of my life. Now I can tell you this and thank you, dear friend. You taught me to love the past and the culture of Ireland. You were a generous teacher, who enriched my life enormously.”

  He said what he had always felt but kept silent about because of shyness. Ever since he met her he had admired and loved the historian and writer Alice Stopford Green, whose books and studies about the historical past and legends and myths of Ireland, and on Gaelic, had contributed more than anything else to giving Roger the “Celtic pride” he boasted of so vigorously that at times it unleashed the ridicule even of his nationalist friends. He had met Alice eleven or twelve years earlier, when he asked for her help in the Congo Reform Association that he had founded with Edmund D. Morel. The public struggle of these new friends against Leopold II and his Machiavellian creation, the Congo Free State, had begun. The enthusiasm with which Alice Stopford Green devoted herself to their campaign to denounce the horrors in the Congo was decisive in having the many writers and politicians who were her friends join as well. Alice became Roger’s intellectual tutor and guide, and he, whenever he was in London, attended her weekly salon. These gatherings were attended by professors, journalists, poets, painters, musicians, and politicians who generally, like her, were critics of imperialism and colonialism and supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, and even radical nationalists who demanded total independence for Ireland. In the elegant, book-lined rooms of the house on Grosvenor Road, where Alice preserved the library of her late husband, the historian John Richard Green, Roger met W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Robert Cunninghame Graham, and many other writers.

  “I have a question I almost asked Gee yesterday but didn’t have the courage. Did Conrad sign the petition? My lawyer and Gee haven’t mentioned his name.”

  Alice shook her head.

  “I wrote to him myself, asking for his signature,” she added with annoyance. “His reasons were confused. He’s always been slippery in political matters. Perhaps, as an assimilated British citizen, he doesn’t feel very secure. On the other hand, as a Pole, he hates Germany as much as Russia, both of which made his country disappear for so many centuries. In short, I don’t know. All your friends regret this very much. One can be a great writer and a coward in political matters. You know that better than anyone, Roger.”

  Roger agreed. He regretted having asked the question. It would have been better not to know. The absence of that signature would torment him now just as it had tormented him to learn from his lawyer, Gavan Duffy, that Edmund D. Morel had not wanted to sign the petition for a commutation of his sentence either. His friend, his brother Bulldog! His companion in the struggle to assist the natives of the Congo also refused, claiming reasons of patriotic loyalty in wartime.

  “Conrad’s not having signed won’t change things very much,” said the historian. “His political influence with the Asquith government is nil.”

  “No, of course not,” Roger agreed.

  Perhaps it had no importance in the success or failure of the petition, but for him, in his heart of hearts, it did. It would have done him good to recall, in the fits of despair that assailed him in his cell, that a person of Conrad’s prestige, admired by so many people—himself included—had helped at this critical moment and sent him, with his signature, a message of understanding and friendship.

  “You met him a long time ago, didn’t you?” Alice asked, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Twenty-six years ago exactly. In June 1890, in the Congo,” Roger specified. “He wasn’t a writer yet. Though, if I remember correctly, he told me he had begun a novel. No doubt it was Almayer’s Folly, the first one he published. He sent it to me, with a dedication. I still have the book somewhere. He hadn’t published anything yet. He was a sailor. You could barely understand his English, his Polish accent was so thick.”

  “You still can’t understand him,” Alice said with a smile. “He still speaks English with that awful accent. As if he were ‘chewing pebbles,’ as Bernard Shaw says. But he writes it like an angel, whether we like him or not.”

  Roger recalled the day in June 1890 when, perspiring in the humid heat and bothered by the bites of mosquitoes gorging on his foreigner’s skin, the young captain in the British merchant fleet arrived in Matadi. About thirty, with a high forehead, deep black beard, robust body, and deep-set eyes, his name was Konrad Korzeniowski, a Pole who had become a British citizen a few years earlier. Contracted by the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, he came to serve as captain of one of the small steamboats that carried goods and merchants back and forth between Leopoldville–Kinshasa and the distant cataracts of Stanley Falls in Kisangani. It was his first position as a ship’s captain, and he was filled with hopes and projects. He arrived in the Congo imbued with all the fantasies and myths used by Leopold II to create the image of a great humanitarian, a monarch determined to civilize Africa and free the Congolese from slavery, paganism, and other barbarities. In spite of his long experience sailing the seas of Asia and the Americas, his gift for languages, and his readings, there was something innocent and childlike in the Pole that charmed Roger immediately. The feeling was mutual, for from the day they met until three weeks later, when Korzeniowski left in the company of thirty porters on the caravan route to Leopoldville–Kinshasa, where he would take command of his ship Le roi des Belges, they saw each other morning, noon, and night.

  They went for excursions in the environs of Matadi, as far as the now nonexistent Vivi, the first, transitory capital of the colony of which not even the rubble remained, and the mouth of the Mpozo River where, according to legend, the first rapids of Livingstone Falls and the Devil’s Cauldron had stopped the Portuguese Diego Cão four centuries earlier. On the Lafundi plain, Roger showed the young Pole the place where Henry Morton Stanley built his first house, which disappeared years later in a fire. But, above all, they talked a good deal about a great number of things, though principally about what was going on in the new Congo Free State where Konrad had just set foot and Roger had already spent six years. After a few days of their friendship, the Polish mariner had formed an idea of the place where he had come to work that was very different from the one he had brought with him. And, as he told Roger when they said goodbye at dawn on Saturday, June 28, 1890, en route to the Crystal Mountains, he had been “deflowered.” That is how he said it, in his gravelly, stony, sonorous accent: “You’ve deflowered me, Casement. About Leopold the Second, about the Congo Free State. Perhaps even about life.” And he repeated, dramatically: “Deflowered.”

  They saw each other again several times, on Roger’s trips to London, and exchanged a few letters. Thirteen years after that first meeting, in June 1903, Roger, who was in England, received an invitation from Joseph Conrad (that was his name now, and he was already a prestigious writer) to spend a weekend at Pent Farm, his small country house in Hythe, Kent. The novelist led a frugal, solitary life there with his wife and son. Roger had a warm memory of those few days with the writer. Now he had silver in his hair and a thick beard, he had put on weight and acquired a certain intellectual arrogance in the way he expressed himself. But with Casement he was exceptionally effusive. When Roger co
ngratulated him on his Congolese novel, Heart of Darkness, which he had just read and which had stirred him deeply because it was the most extraordinary description of the horrors people were living through in the Congo, Conrad cut him short with his hands.

  “You should have appeared as co-author of that book, Casement,” he declared, patting him on the shoulder. “I never would have written it without your help. You removed the scales from my eyes. About Africa, about the Congo Free State. And about the human beast.”

  Alone after dinner—the discreet Mrs. Conrad, a woman of very humble background, and the child had gone to bed—the writer, following the second glass of port, told Roger that for what he was doing to help the indigenous Congolese, he deserved to be called “the British Bartolomé de las Casas.” Roger blushed to the roots of his hair at such praise. How was it possible that someone who had so high an opinion of him, who had helped him and Edmund D. Morel so much in their campaign against Leopold II, had refused to sign a petition that asked only for his death sentence to be commuted? How could that compromise him with the government?

  He recalled other occasional meetings with Conrad on his visits to London. They saw each other once at Roger’s club, the Wellington Club on Grosvenor Place, when he was with colleagues from the Foreign Office. The writer insisted that Roger stay to have a cognac with him after his companions had left. They recalled the sailor’s disastrous state of mind six months after he had passed through Matadi, when he returned. Roger was still working there, in charge of stores and transport. Konrad Korzeniowski was not even a shadow of the enthusiastic young man full of hope Roger had met half a year earlier. He looked years older, his nerves were frayed, and he had stomach problems because of parasites. Constant diarrhea caused him to lose many pounds. Embittered and pessimistic, he dreamed only of returning to London as soon as possible to put himself in the hands of real doctors.