The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “What matters now, Roger, is not Cardinal Bourne, or me, or the Catholics in England, or the ones in Ireland,” said Father Carey. “What matters now is you. Your reencounter with God. There’s the strength, the truth, the peace you deserve after an intense life filled with the many trials you’ve had to face.”

  “Yes, yes, Father Carey,” Roger agreed eagerly. “I know. Exactly. I try to make myself heard, to reach Him. At certain times, not very often, it seems I have. Then I finally feel a little peace, that incredible calm. Like certain nights in Africa, with a full moon, the sky filled with stars, not a drop of wind moving the trees, the murmur of the insects. Everything so beautiful, so tranquil, I would always think: ‘God exists. How, seeing what I see, could I even imagine He doesn’t?’ But at other times, most of the time, I don’t see Him, He doesn’t answer, He doesn’t listen to me. In my life, most of the time, I’ve felt very alone. Nowadays it happens very frequently. But God’s solitude is much worse. Then, I tell myself: ‘God doesn’t listen to me and won’t listen to me. I’m going to die as alone as I’ve lived.’ It’s something that torments me day and night, Father.”

  “He is there, Roger. He listens to you. He knows what you feel, that you need Him. He will not fail. If there’s something I can guarantee, that I’m absolutely sure of, it’s that God will not fail you.”

  In the dark, stretched out on his cot, Roger thought Father Carey had imposed on himself a task as heroic or even more heroic than that of the rebels at the barricades: bringing consolation and peace to desperate, destroyed creatures who were going to spend many years in a cell or were preparing themselves for the gallows. A terrible, potentially dehumanizing work that on many days must have driven Father Carey, above all at the beginning of his ministry, to despair. But he knew how to hide it. He always stayed calm and at every moment transmitted a feeling of comprehension and solidarity that did Roger so much good. Once they had talked about the Rising.

  “What would you have done, Father Carey, if you had been in Dublin during those days?”

  “Go to lend spiritual aid to whoever needed it, as so many priests did.”

  He added that it wasn’t necessary to agree with the rebels’ idea that the freedom of Ireland would be achieved only with weapons to offer them spiritual support.

  Of course it wasn’t what Father Carey believed; he had always urged a visceral rejection of violence. But he would have gone to hear confessions, give communion, pray for whoever asked him to, help the nurses and doctors. That is what a good number of male and female religious had done, and the hierarchy had supported them. Shepherds had to be where the flock was, didn’t they?

  All of that was true, but it was also true there was never enough room for the idea of God in the limited space of human reason. It had to be squeezed in with a shoehorn because it never fit completely. Roger and Herbert Ward had often spoken about this. “In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason,” Herbert would say. “If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke.”

  Roger had spent his life believing and doubting. Not even now, at the door of death, was he capable of believing in God with the resolute faith of his mother, his father, or his brothers and sister. How lucky those people were for whom the existence of the Supreme Being had never been a problem but a certainty, thanks to which the world was ordered and everything had an explanation and a reason for being. People who believed in that way would undoubtedly achieve a resignation in the face of death never known by those, like him, who had lived playing hide-and-seek with God. Roger recalled that he had once written a poem with that title: “Hide-and-Seek with God.” But Herbert Ward assured him it was very bad, and he threw it away. Too bad. He would have liked to reread and correct it now.

  Dawn was beginning to break. A small ray of light appeared between the bars on the high window. Soon they’d come so he could take away the bucket of urine and excrement, and then they would bring him breakfast.

  He thought the first meal of the day arrived later than usual. The sun was already high in the sky and a cold, golden light illuminated his cell. He spent a long time reading and rereading the maxims of Thomas à Kempis regarding the mistrust of knowledge that makes human beings arrogant, and the waste of time it is to “ponder dark, mysterious things,” ignorance of which we would not be reproached for at the Final Judgment, when he heard the large key turn in the lock and the cell door open.

  “Good morning,” said the guard, leaving the dark roll and cup of coffee on the floor. Or would it be tea today? For inexplicable reasons, breakfast frequently changed from tea to coffee or coffee to tea.

  “Good morning,” said Roger, standing and going to pick up the bucket. “Are you later today than usual or am I mistaken?”

  Faithful to the order of silence, the guard didn’t answer and it seemed he avoided looking him in the eye. He moved away from the door to let him pass, and Roger went out to the long, soot-filled passageway, carrying the bucket. The guard walked two paces behind him. He felt his spirits rise with the summer sun reflecting on the thick walls and stone floor, producing gleams that seemed like sparks. He thought about the parks of London, the Serpentine, the tall plane trees, poplars, and chestnut trees of Hyde Park, and how beautiful it would be to walk there right now, anonymous among the sportsmen riding horses or bicycles and the families with children who, taking advantage of the good weather, had come to spend the day outdoors.

  In the deserted bathroom—they must have given instructions that his time for cleaning up would be different from that of the other prisoners—he emptied and scrubbed the bucket. Then he sat on the toilet without success—constipation had been a lifelong problem—and, finally, removing the blue prison smock, he vigorously washed and scrubbed his body and face. He dried himself with the partially damp towel hanging from a screw eye. He returned slowly to his cell with the clean bucket, enjoying the sun that came into the passageway from the barred windows high on the wall and the noises—unintelligible voices, horns, steps, motors, squeaks—that gave him the impression of having reentered time and disappeared as soon as the guard locked the cell door with a key.

  The drink could be tea or coffee. He didn’t care how tasteless it was, since the liquid, as it went down in his chest toward his stomach, helped to relieve the acidity that always troubled him in the morning. He kept the roll in case he became hungry later.

  Lying on his cot, he resumed reading the Imitation of Christ. At times he thought it childishly ingenuous, but then, when he turned the page, he encountered a thought that disturbed him and led him to close the book. He began to meditate. The monk said it was useful for a man to suffer sorrows and adversities from time to time because that reminded him of his condition: he was “exiled on this earth” and should not place any hope in the things of this world, only in those of the hereafter. It was true. The German monk in his convent at Agnetenberg, five hundred years earlier, had hit the nail on the head, expressed a truth that Roger had experienced firsthand. Or, to be specific, ever since his mother’s death when he was a boy plunged him into an orphanhood he could never escape. That was the word that best described what he had always felt himself to be in Scotland, England, Africa, Brazil, Iquitos, Putumayo: an exile. For a good part of his life, he had boasted of his status as a citizen of the world, which, according to Alice, Yeats admired in him: someone who isn’t from anywhere because he’s from everywhere. For a long time he had told himself that this privilege granted him a freedom unknown to those who lived anchored in a single place. But Thomas à Kempis was right. He had never felt he was from anywhere because that was the human condition: exile in this vale of tears, a transient destiny until, with death and the hereafter, men and women would return to the fold, their nutritive source, where they would live for all eternity.

  On the other hand, Thomas à Kempis’s prescription for resisting temptation was naïve. Had that pious man, there in his solitary convent, ever been tempted? If he had, it couldn’t have been so easy
for him to resist and defeat the “devil who never sleeps and is always on the prowl hunting for someone to devour.” Thomas à Kempis said no one was so perfect that he never felt temptation, and it was impossible for a Christian to see himself absolved from “concupiscence,” the root of all the others.

  He had been weak and succumbed to concupiscence many times. Not as many as he had written in his pocket diaries and notebooks, even though writing what he hadn’t experienced, what he only had wanted to experience, was undoubtedly also a way—cowardly and timid—to have the experience and therefore surrender to temptation. Was he paying for that in spite of not really having enjoyed it except in the uncertain, ungraspable way fantasies were experienced? Would he have to pay for everything he hadn’t done, had only desired and written about? God would know how to differentiate and surely would punish those rhetorical errors less severely than the sins he had really committed.

  In any event, writing what he hadn’t experienced, in order to pretend he had, already carried an implicit punishment: the sensation of failure and frustration in which the lying games in his diaries always ended (as did the real experiences, for that matter). But now those irresponsible games had placed in the hands of the enemy a formidable weapon to vilify his name and memory.

  Yet it wasn’t easy to know to which temptations Thomas à Kempis was referring. They could come so disguised, so deceptive, that they were confused with benign things, with esthetic enthusiasms. Roger recalled, in those distant years of his adolescence, that his first feelings for well-formed bodies, virile muscles, the harmonious slimness of adolescents, did not seem a malicious, concupiscent emotion but a manifestation of sensibility and esthetic enthusiasm. This is what he had believed for a long time. And this same artistic vocation was what had induced him to learn how to take photographs in order to capture those beautiful bodies on pieces of cardboard. At some moment he realized, when he was already living in Africa, that his admiration was not healthy or, rather, it was not only healthy but healthy and unhealthy at the same time, for those harmonious, sweating, muscular bodies, without a drop of oil, in which he could perceive the material sensuality of felines, produced in him, along with ecstasy and admiration, avidity, desire, a mad longing to caress them. This was how temptations became part of his life, revolutionized it, filled it with secrets, anguish, fear, but also with startling moments of pleasure. And remorse and bitterness, of course. At the supreme moment, would God do the arithmetic? Would He pardon him? Punish him? He felt curious, not terrified. As if it didn’t concern him but was an intellectual exercise or conundrum.

  And at that moment, he heard with surprise the heavy key entering the lock again. When the door of his cell opened, a sudden blaze of light came in, the strong sun that suddenly seemed to set August mornings in London on fire. Blinded, he was aware that three people had entered the cell. He couldn’t make out their faces. He stood. When the door closed he saw that the person closest to him, almost touching him, was the governor of Pentonville Prison, whom he had seen only a few times. He was an older man, thin and wrinkled, dressed in a dark suit. His expression was grave. Behind him was the sheriff, as white as a sheet, and a guard who looked at the floor. It seemed to Roger that the silence lasted for centuries.

  Finally, looking into his eyes, the governor spoke, at first with a hesitant voice that became firmer as his statement proceeded:

  “I am fulfilling my duty to communicate to you that this morning, August second, 1916, the Council of Ministers of the government of His Majesty the king has met, studied the petition for clemency presented by your lawyers, and rejected it in a unanimous vote of the ministers present. Consequently, the sentence of the court that tried and condemned you for high treason will be carried out tomorrow, August third, 1916, in the courtyard of Pentonville Prison, at nine o’clock in the morning. According to established custom, for his execution the criminal does not have to wear the prison uniform and may put on the civilian clothes taken from him when he entered the prison, which will be returned to him. Similarly, I am obliged to communicate to you that the chaplains, the Catholic priest Father Carey and Father MacCarroll of the same faith, will be available to lend you spiritual assistance if you so desire. They will be the only persons with whom you may communicate. If you wish to leave letters for family members with your final arrangements, the establishment will provide writing materials. If you have some other request to make, you may do so now.”

  “At what time will I be able to see the chaplains?” Roger asked, and he thought his voice was hoarse and icy.

  The governor turned to the sheriff, they exchanged a few whispered phrases, and the sheriff responded:

  “They’ll come early in the afternoon.”

  “Thank you.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the three men left the cell and Roger listened to how the guard inserted the key in the lock.

  XIV

  Roger Casement initiated the period in his life when he would be most deeply immersed in the problems of Ireland by traveling to the Canary Islands in January 1913. As the ship sailed into the Atlantic, a great weight lifted. He was detaching himself from images of Iquitos, Putumayo, the rubber plantations, Manaus, the Barbadians, Julio C. Arana, the intrigues of the Foreign Office, and he retrieved a commitment he could now pour into his country’s affairs. He had already done what he could for the natives of Amazonia. Arana, one of their worst persecutors, would not raise his head again: a ruined man who had lost his good name, it was not impossible he would end his days in prison. Now he had to concern himself with other natives, the ones from Ireland. They, too, needed to free themselves from the Aranas exploiting them, though with weapons more refined and hypocritical than those of the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian rubber barons.

  But in spite of the liberation he felt on leaving London, both during the crossing and the month he stayed in Las Palmas, he was bothered by deteriorating health. The arthritic pains in his hip and back occurred at any time of the day and night. Analgesics did not have the effect they’d once had. He had to spend hours lying in bed in his hotel or in a cold sweat in an armchair on the terrace. He moved with difficulty, always with a cane, and he could no longer take long excursions through the countryside or along the foothills as he had on earlier trips, for fear that in the middle of the walk the pain would paralyze him. His best memories of those weeks in early 1913 were the hours he spent submerged in Ireland’s past, thanks to his reading of a book by Alice Stopford Green, The Old Irish World, in which history, mythology, legend, and traditions were combined to portray a society of adventure and fantasy, conflicts and creativity, where a struggling, generous people grew in the face of a difficult nature, and celebrated courage and inventiveness with their songs, their dances, their hazardous games, their rites and customs: an entire patrimony that the British occupation came to shatter and attempt to annihilate, without complete success.

  On the third day he was in the city of Las Palmas he went out, after supper, to walk around the port, a district filled with taverns, bars, and small hotels connected to brothels. In Santa Catalina Park, near Las Canteras beach, after examining his surroundings, he approached two young men with the air of sailors to ask for a light. He spoke with them for a moment. His imperfect Spanish, mixed with Portuguese, provoked hilarity in the boys. He suggested going for a drink, but one of them had a date, and so he was with Miguel, the younger one, a dark boy with curly hair just out of adolescence. They went to a narrow, smoky bar called Almirante Colón, Admiral Columbus, where an older woman was singing accompanied by a guitar player. After the second drink, Roger, sheltered by the semidarkness of the place, extended a hand and rested it on Miguel’s leg. The boy smiled, agreeing. Emboldened, Roger moved his hand toward his fly. He felt the boy’s sex and a wave of desire ran through him from head to toe. For many months—How many? he thought, three, six?—he had been a man without sex, desires, or fantasies. It seemed to him that with his excitement, youth and love of life returned
to his veins. “Can we go to a hotel?” he asked. Miguel smiled, not agreeing or refusing, but he didn’t make the slightest effort to get up. Instead, he asked for another glass of the strong, spicy wine they had been served. When the woman finished singing, Roger asked for the bill. He paid and they left. “Can we go to a hotel?” he eagerly asked again in the street. The boy seemed undecided, or perhaps he delayed answering in order to make him beg and increase the fee he’d obtain for his services. Then Roger felt what seemed the slash of a knife in his hip that made him hunch over and lean against the railing of a window. This time the pain didn’t come gradually, as it had on other occasions, but all at once, and more intense than usual. Like the slash of a knife, yes. He had to sit on the ground, doubled over. Frightened, Miguel hurried away, not asking what had happened or saying goodbye. Roger stayed there a long time, hunched over, eyes closed, waiting for the red-hot blade mortifying his back to lessen. When he could stand, he had to walk several blocks, very slowly, dragging his feet, until he found a car that would take him to the hotel. Only at dawn did the pain ease, allowing him to sleep. In his sleep, agitated and filled with nightmares, he suffered and felt pleasure at the edge of a precipice he was constantly in danger of falling into.

  The next morning, as he had breakfast, he opened his diary and, writing slowly in a tiny hand, made love to Miguel several times, first in the darkness of Santa Catalina Park hearing the murmur of the sea, and then in the foul room of a small hotel where they heard the howl of the ships’ sirens. The dark boy rode him, mocking him, “You’re an old man, that’s what you are, a very old old man,” and slapping him on the buttocks, which made him moan, perhaps in pain, perhaps with pleasure.