But he didn’t go blind. The man’s body shook, as if he hadn’t quite digested that natural spectacle, and he headed from the anthill towards where the Negroes were. The men moved away shrieking, even with all Pepe’s threats to keep them still. And, in that moment, the intruder spoke.
Such a strange language had never before been heard in the Congo. It sounded as if he spoke with his mouth filled with stones. He expressed himself with a dry, and not at all friendly, passion. It was obvious that the intruder was struggling to communicate some message. He did so with both arms held high and all twelve fingers spread open, ranting with the full force of his lungs. At one particular moment he pulled out an object that he carried hidden amongst his clothes: a metal pole almost two feet long, whose upper part was crowned with two smaller sticks in the shape of a cross. The white man stuck the pole into the ground and, with great solemnity, started shouting out a speech. Naturally, no one understood a word. But the image itself was extraordinary: an individual of the most unknown origin making an appeal with his arms open wide and stretched out parallel to the ground. Slowly their fear became mixed with curiosity.
‘Mr Garvey, what should we do?’
Pepe’s question was not poorly timed. The work at the mine had stopped and the miners, now free, could get into all sorts of trouble. He wondered what William would do. Shoot him in the liver, of course. But William wasn’t there, and Marcus had never shot anyone. At least not without a direct order.
Pepe insisted, and he was right, because they were running a much more serious risk than it seemed. There were more than a hundred Negroes. For the first time since they had arrived at the clearing, they were free. The only defence that Marcus and Pepe had was the shotgun. The shotgun and the fact that the miners were still stunned by the newcomer’s presence. Anything could happen. For the moment the Negroes looked at the man with their mouths agape. (Garvey didn’t understand that the Negroes could be attracted to the two diagonally crossed sticks. I could. I wasn’t surprised at all that they were willing to take an interest in any novelty that allowed them to avoid, even for only a little while, the life imposed on them by the Craver brothers.)
Marcus walked across the circle formed by the miners. Not even he knew what he wanted to do. But he was bold enough to grab the pole and gauge the weight of it with his hands. He brought the object close to his eyes and observed it carefully. He didn’t find anything. It was only what it appeared to be: a pole with two little sticks on the upper part.
He began with timid laughter, which soon became riotous. At first the miners didn’t understand. Pepe did and he soon joined in. They looked at each other and then at the white man, and they both started laughing at once. After all, if you took away the newcomer’s noisy speech, and the exoticism of his skin and clothes, he was just an old man. A loud-mouthed, stubborn old man that worshipped a cross. Nothing more.
Some of the Negroes also began to laugh. They pointed to the white man and the pole and they laughed. Little by little, more voices joined the laughter. It was as if they were waking up slowly from a ridiculous dream. The white man became annoyed and his tone became more aggressive. Too late. The entire clearing had already become clamorous laughter. In fact, his irate efforts to stop the howls became the main reason for it.
The wild laughter of the miners, Pepe and Marcus all blended together, and no one could stop it. Some of them lay on the ground splitting their sides, others smacked their thighs with their palms or grabbed their stomach with both arms. Marcus collided with Pepe. They hugged and fell on their knees without letting go of each other.
Garvey remembered that group laughter very well. I could understand him. But, from my perspective, the reason the laughter spread that way wasn’t because of the intruder. It had been months since those men, Marcus included, had laughed. Not once, not even a sad smile. They had no reason to, slaves to a jungle mine. And now, for a few brief moments, all the hierarchies, suffering and punishments vanished behind a veil of laughter.
They could have continued laughing for hours and hours. But the sound of a shot into the air above the clearing stopped them. It was the Craver brothers. William had shot his rifle into the air and came towards them, followed closely by Richard. It was so unimaginably chaotic that even William Craver was surprised. He asked, more into the void than to Marcus, ‘Do you mind telling me what’s going on?’
William still hadn’t noticed the intruder’s presence and he started screaming at Marcus.
‘Have you gone mad? The Negroes are out of the mine. And unchained! Are you drunk or are you …’
He didn’t finish his sentence. The Craver brothers had just seen the white man.
‘My God …’ said Richard.
William didn’t allow himself to be impressed. He went up to the intruder with the authority that his long stride gave him. He only stopped when his nose was less than a palm’s length away from the man. He looked at him with aggressive curiosity. William was a master of insolence, he knew how to offend without even speaking. But he didn’t manage to make the man bat an eyelid. When the Cravers saw the newcomer their vehemence turned to silence. The two brothers’ entrance into the clearing was a clear demonstration of their power. He had understood his inferiority and maintained a passive attitude. William touched him with four fingers. He jabbed his chest a little and said, ‘You! Who are you? What do you want?’
He got no response. The man moved his head looking alternately at William and at the hand that touched him. Richard approached them and took over for his brother, shouting right into the newcomer’s ear, ‘Do you mind telling us who the hell you are? You! Yes! You! Answer!’
Suddenly, with an unexpected gesture, Richard raised the butt of his enormous shotgun threateningly. Anyone would have ducked their head, even just as a reflex. Not the intruder. No one could be totally sure if his attitude was arrogance or idiocy.
‘We’ll start again. Who are you?’
He thought about it for a long time, but this time he answered.
‘Teeec Tôn,’ he said. ‘Teeec Tôn.’
‘And now what’s he saying?’ asked Richard, scratching the nape of his neck.
‘How do you expect me to know?’ roared William. ‘It’s the first white monkey I’ve ever seen.’ And turning towards Pepe, ‘Pepe! Do you understand him?’
‘No, Mr William.’
‘Well then, at least make the monkeys shut up!’
The Negroes started making a ruckus again. The Cravers’ arrival had made the humorous aspect of the situation fade. That’s the problem with general boisterous laughter. It can be very democratic and very amusing, but it doesn’t solve anything. On the other hand, in front of the Cravers the man had a different tone. Less passionate, much more dangerous. He no longer wanted to convince anyone. He was just introducing himself. And that word, ‘Tecton’, became the detonator for a new outbreak of panic.
Pepe had to distribute many blows with the rifle butt to reestablish silence. Meanwhile, William forced the man to take off his cassock, which ended up in Marcus’s hands. It wasn’t made of cloth. It was a mosaic of tiny pieces, like a reptile’s scales. He admired it. Thousands of little sewn stones, smaller than a baby’s fingernails. The result was an incredibly flexible suit of armour, light and compact. It didn’t seem to be designed to resist the impact of any weapon, but rather to surpass natural obstacles. Marcus saw dirt stuck to the little stones. He smelled it. A warmth and smell entered his nostrils that he would have recognised anywhere: the stones came from the mine.
Beneath the tunic there was some sort of pyjama. A red hide, extraordinarily thin and very tight against his skin. William ordered him to take it off. The skin that appeared under the red pyjama was unusually white. Marcus thought of a white mouse. His pectorals were somewhat fallen, his musculature aged but still firm, the mass of his thighs shrunken. It all spoke of a body that had entered the autumn of life. No one mentioned his pubic hair, but all eyes went to those hairs, as white as his
skin.
William ran out of ideas. By stripping him he had wanted to diminish the man’s dignity, but it was as intact as before. After a second’s hesitation, William pulled Richard away. It was a very unique moment. William and Richard spoke in private, a few paces beyond the newcomer, who was left alone. He continued looking at everything with those absorbent eyes, without moving or reacting. Pepe held his rifle very tightly and kept it trained on him. Marcus, without getting even an inch closer, asked him, ‘Tecton? Is that what you’re called, sir? Is that your name? You are Mr Tecton?’
The man moved his neck slowly, like a periscope turning on a poorly greased axis, and he placed his eyes on the mouth that questioned him. His eyes were more feline than human. Marcus would never forget that gaze. He had the sensation that this man saw things in him that even he hadn’t known existed.
‘Teec Tôn,’ repeated the man.
And he didn’t bother to add anything else. William and Richard aborted the halting dialogue then. Richard grabbed the man by the arm, William ordered, ‘Pepe, Marcus. Set up the little tent.’
They obeyed. It was a very small tent, unused. Once it was erected, they nailed a stake into the ground in the centre of the tent. There they made the man sit, tied to the stake by the wrists and waist.
For William and Richard all this was an unforeseen and annoying occurrence. For the moment they preferred to concentrate on getting the mine up and running again. They sensed that the visit would create problems for them. And they were right. Even though the intruder was tied up, and very securely tied up at that, far out of the Negroes’ sight, he brought about an incident that was the closest thing to a mutiny that the expedition had seen. The men refused to go back to the mine. One hundred voices shouted in unison the only white word they knew: ‘Champagne! Champagne! Champagne!’
Pepe didn’t know how to contain the uproar. William did. He approached the loudest one and emptied six bullets from a revolver into his head. All six. Marcus was reminded of a watermelon that his mother had thrown to the ground with all her strength during an argument with his father.
‘You don’t want to go back down into the mine?’ said William. ‘Fine, we’ll give you a day off. Pepe, Marcus, tie them to the trees that surround the clearing. By the wrists and ankles. I’ll check the knots.’
Marcus couldn’t sleep at night. He knew that Pepe wasn’t sleeping either, even though they had blown out the oil lamp a while ago. He turned to him and said, ‘What about you, Pepe? What are you thinking about?’
‘I’m doing everything I can to not think about it,’ he responded from the darkness.
‘We thought that this region was uninhabited,’ Marcus sighed, ‘but maybe a bit further on, beyond the next hill, there’s a tribe of white men.’
And he turned over. But Pepe had something else to say, ‘He didn’t come from beyond, he came from below.’
‘What? I don’t understand you.’
‘I saw it,’ said Pepe’s voice. ‘I was standing guard and the men started shouting. When I stuck my head out, when I looked inside the anthill, he was already in there. There below, among the men, who shrank from him, deathly afraid. He was dusting off the dirt that was stuck to his clothes.’
‘If that’s the case,’ asked Marcus, ‘where did he come from?’
‘I felt sorry for the men. I let them out of the hole myself, I lowered the ladder. Then no one thought of taking it away, of course. They just wanted to flee the mine. I had to keep them from going too far. And meanwhile up he climbed.’ Pepe lowered his voice, as if afraid that Mr Tecton might hear him, ‘No, I don’t know where he came from.’
There was a very long silence. Marcus broke it by saying, ‘And don’t you feel sorry for him?
‘Sorry? For who?’
‘Mr Tecton,’ stated Marcus. ‘If you really look at it, he hasn’t done anything. He was just there. And for that they made him a prisoner, because he crossed William and Richard’s path, nothing more. I’m sure they’re going to kill him. Sooner or later.’
Pepe lifted his head from the pillow. Marcus couldn’t see him but he guessed his movements, the breath from that black mouth only inches from his face.
‘Can you see me, Marcus?’
‘No, Pepe, of course not,’ said Marcus, a little offended by the simple question. ‘It’s pitch black, Pepe. And you’re black.’
‘That’s the problem with white people,’ said Pepe, lying back down. ‘You can’t see darkness.’
A little while later Marcus left the tent. The most significant thing about the episode that followed is that as he told it, he made excuses for each and every one of his actions. First, he insisted that he was only going to urinate at the edge of the clearing. Impossible. Each one of the trees that marked the limits of the camp had a black man tied to its trunk. The entire perimeter was filled with prisoners that moaned softly. With mute gestures and without much hope, they begged him to loosen the cords that William had forced them to tighten sadistically. But Marcus couldn’t help them. If he took pity on one man the others would demand the same treatment, getting louder and louder until William eventually woke up.
He headed towards the prisoner’s tent. He swore he only wanted to give him water. No one had taken care of him all day, and Marcus knew that the tropical heat could be very cruel beneath a closed tent. Once he was inside he lit an oil lamp. It was a big mistake, because the light showed him a naked, bound man. Nothing more. Mr Tecton focused his eyes on the oil lamp. His eyes were round like coins. Before the flame his pupils narrowed until they were thinner than a hair. He didn’t speak. Defenceless, captive, lacking the rhetorical grandiloquence he had had that morning, he seemed like a different man. Before Marcus could ask himself what he was doing, he had already set him free. Why? Out of pity?
The man didn’t thank him. He didn’t say a word. Marcus took him by the arm and escorted him out of there. Once they were at the door to his tent, he gestured to him to wait while he looked for the red pyjama and the clothing made of little stones. He felt his way along in the dark so he wouldn’t wake up Pepe, which was ridiculous. He could see Pepe’s eyes blinking in the darkness. Even though the Negro man was the soul of discretion, Marcus whispered, ‘Don’t say anything.’
He left with what he had come to find and he took Mr Tecton to the mine. He asked him for help setting up the ladder, but the man continued to be completely apathetic.
Marcus carried an oil lamp, which he used to illuminate the mine, and as he brought it close to the walls he realised that he was inside an enormous Gruyere cheese. The excavation had uncovered a curious geological landscape: some kind of round-mouthed tunnels opened up everywhere, of all different sizes. Some were as small as apples, others larger than the diameter of a large tree. It was such a curious sight that he almost forgot about Mr Tecton.
‘This is yours,’ said Marcus.
He kindly handed over his clothing and went back to investigating the holes that spotted the walls. Perhaps he shouldn’t have turned his back on him. In that case he would have seen someone who, once dressed, had recovered his earlier personality. The clothes did more than just cover his nudity. He left his captivity behind and once again became that arrogant creature.
Right before the attack Marcus heard something. A rough voice that whispered sweet things into his left ear. He didn’t have time to say or do anything. An arm went around his neck with extraordinary force.
That aggression was the last thing Marcus was expecting. He had freed him, he had dressed him, he had helped him get home. And Mr Tecton had repaid him by attacking him from behind. Why? Why? The sleeve that constricted his throat, wrapped in that cloth made of flexible stone, felt like an iron snake. A burning rattle came from his lungs. He felt the arm lift him off the ground like a hangman’s noose. He realised that they were both entering one of the wider tunnels. Mr Tecton wanted to take him with him!
Marcus’s sight became obscured. Because the arm was depriving him of oxygen and beca
use he already had his whole thorax inside a dark lair. Behind him, all that was left of the Congo was a point of weak light. Ahead, pure blackness. And beyond that? Where was Mr Tecton taking him?
‘No!’
Mr Tecton was on top of him. He pressed him into the ground and dragged him with his free arm, further and further into the tunnel. Marcus struggled with his fists and feet. With his heels he tried to hit his rival’s ankles. He used his hands, his head, neck, shoulders, anything he could to get free. But in such a narrow space, and in that captive position, it was very difficult to do any damage to anyone. What’s more, he was an incredibly strong man for his age. Marcus only managed to irritate him. He grunted something and squeezed his neck a little tighter.
They had already travelled three feet, six feet, nine feet. But when air no longer entered his throat, a second before losing consciousness, he felt his hand grasp Mr Tecton’s ear. One of those bat ears, with long lobes rising from both sides of his face. Marcus pulled with all his might. He must have hurt him, because he shrieked. He pulled harder, and with the energy he had left he jammed his nails into his flesh as much as he could.
Mr Tecton cursed sharply and loosened his grip. Slightly, only slightly. Marcus took the opportunity to slip beneath his body and he felt the stone tunic tear the back of his shirt. He fell to the mine floor, the sand grazing his bare back.
He looked up, flat on the ground and breathless, ready to fight like a cat on its back. During an indefinite interval Mr Tecton scrutinised him, wondering if he would attack again or not. He was only four feet or so above Marcus. He looked like a spider, with half of his body outside the tunnel and his hands free. The light from the oil lamp bathed the dark garnet walls. Marcus grunted with his fists clenched in front of him, terrified. The struggle and the mine had covered him in a layer of unnatural warmth.
Mr Tecton clicked his tongue in displeasure. He turned around, twisting his waist with leathery flexibility, and disappeared into the hole.