‘Get dressed,’ he said, still drinking whisky. ‘You’re going home.’
At first she didn’t understand. But Marcus was resolute. He even helped her with the buttons on the shirt to hurry things up. They left the tent together. Marcus moved with firm steps toward the mine. He brought her with him, holding her by the elbow. He was moving with such momentum that he was almost dragging her behind him.
Pepe saw the startling pair. She was at least a head taller than him, and so white next to his olive-coloured skin, while he set the pace with his short legs.
‘Mr Marcus? Where are you going?’
Pepe was speaking to him formally. That sign of respect could not be good. Marcus didn’t answer. Pepe insisted.
‘Please, Mr Marcus, don’t do it.’
‘Why not?’ said Marcus without turning around, almost at the anthill.
‘Mr Marcus! She is different. She belongs to Mr William. We’ll have problems, many problems. Don’t do it!’
Marcus went down the ladder to the mine behind her. The men had stopped working and were watching them, dumbfounded. When they stepped into the mine all the Negroes moved away.
‘Will you shoot me, Pepe?’ challenged Marcus.
He took Amgam to the hole through which she had come into their world.
‘Mr Marcus!’ shouted Pepe. ‘Leave it alone! I won’t warn you again!’
Marcus raised his head. Up there, at the mouth of the anthill and silhouetted against the clouds, was the brawny figure of Pepe, aiming at him with his old rifle. Marcus stopped. But in the end he decided, ‘You won’t shoot. I’m sure of it.’
Pepe hesitated for a few incredibly long seconds. Then he lowered his gun and said resignedly, ‘No, I won’t do it. Obviously I won’t do it.’
But Pepe’s resignation was not Marcus’s victory, far from it.
When Pepe talked to the Negroes it was as if he did it from underwater. And now he spoke to them in that language filled with bubbles. It didn’t take much for him to convince the Negroes to hold down Marcus and the fugitive.
‘Are you happy, Pepe?’ bellowed Marcus, flailing uselessly among twenty arms. ‘What did you promise them? A plate of lentils?’
‘No,’ said Pepe. ‘Sardines.’
There was nothing he could do. Those men hadn’t fought for their freedom, but they were willing to keep Amgam from having hers. And why. For half a tin of sardines. The saddest part of all was that day they were having sardines anyway. Marcus had found fifty tins recently in a trunk that he had thought was empty. With the treachery or without, they would have eaten sardines.
Amgam and Marcus emerged from the mine. When he had climbed the last step of the ladder and was passing Pepe, Marcus leaned close to his ear and said, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
Once he was out of the mine, Marcus didn’t dare look her in the eyes. He continued his route as if she didn’t exist, heading into the jungle. When he was far enough away from the camp, he let himself fall. He curled up like a praying Muslim and he started to cry.
A man’s collapse should be as private an act as his death. When a man falls, when he fails, he has to be protected from public inclemency. But sometimes an apparent failure is a success, when men save their dignity simply by having tried to save it.
Unexpectedly Marcus felt six fingers caressing the nape of his neck. Before they realised it, they were already embracing.
* * *
I remember interrupting Marcus.
‘It’s not possible!’
‘What’s not possible?’ asked Marcus with interest, looking from one side of the table to the other. ‘Did I say something wrong?’
‘Are you saying that you made love to her? That she became your lover?’
Marcus’s face turned the colour of a ripe tomato.
‘I should have kept it to myself, you mean?’
The upper part of my body very tense. I relaxed a bit, resting on the back of the chair.
‘No, it’s not that,’ I said, regretting my outburst. ‘It’s good that you explain everything to me. It’s very good.’
‘So? If it’s not that, what mistake have I made?’
Marcus couldn’t understand that he hadn’t made any mistake, that he had only hurt my feelings. At first the image of Amgam’s fingers on his neck had seemed unbelievable to me, then unbearable. Those six fingers, so white, so thin, so long. I didn’t ask him any more. I didn’t want to hear it. But, inevitably, I imagined Marcus and Amgam holding each other in the middle of the jungle. I felt a cold fire in my heart, a thin, compact blowtorch flame that scorched my chest.
Why did it upset me so much? I didn’t consent to my feelings for Amgam. Actually, I hated them. They had cropped up recently, a few nights earlier, in Mr MacMahon’s room, and in that very moment I sensed the problems they would bring. More ridiculous feelings couldn’t possibly exist in the entire universe. And at the end of that session, sitting in front of Marcus Garvey, I said to myself, ‘Tommy, boy, how can you be jealous of a prisoner, and over a woman that you have never seen and you never will see?’ But I was also clever enough to realise that the question could have been another one: where did Garvey’s ability to hurt me with words come from?
Marcus Garvey’s story exposed my defects and limitations. Until he had explained that he had been with her, I hadn’t understood to what extent I despised him and felt superior to him. It’s very easy for us to be compassionate with someone who is no com petition. I had allowed myself the luxury of being so indulgent and generous with him, a poor gypsy awaiting the gallows. But now my feelings conflicted with his biography. That someone like him could gain access to Amgam’s love upset me. He had had something that I could never have. Never. And never is a very long word. But, in fact, there was nothing extraordinary in that episode. Amgam moved with magical clarity, that at the same time was perfectly logical. What would have been strange was if Amgam had acted any differently. That Marcus was a subordinate, a short- legged gypsy creature, was unimportant. At least for her. Amgam came from another world, she was free of our prejudices. And Marcus was the best man in the clearing. That’s why Amgam loved Marcus. And seeing that Amgam was capable of loving someone like Marcus made me love her even more. And him, a condemned man, I envied.
While I was reflecting on these things, Marcus was still waiting for me, without having the remotest idea of the course my thoughts had taken. He insisted once more, ‘What was my mistake, Mr Thomson?’
I cleared my throat sonorously, trying to cover up my discomfort, and I said, ‘You said earlier that William and Richard had gone out to hunt a lion.’
‘Yes, indeed. Richard had seen lion tracks in the mud. They went out together to look for it. But they didn’t find it.’
‘There are no lions in the jungle,’ I said. ‘It must have been a leopard.’
‘A leopard?’ pondered Marcus. ‘Could be, maybe Richard was talking about a leopard. I don’t remember that well.’
The Craver brothers’ fervour for the mine grew day by day. On the other hand, Richard’s interest in hunting buffalo diminished like a child’s fever: suddenly. William’s sexual passion also slackened. The only reason he didn’t turn her over to his brother was out of a sense of ownership. William was clever, and he knew that the Negroes’ hierarchical instinct was reinforced by that image: the whitest man in the world controlling the whitest woman in the world. Or the underworld. But there was something hard to define in William’s attitude.
Sometimes, only sometimes, it seemed to Marcus that William didn’t use his power over Amgam to control her, but just to keep anyone else from getting close to her. But such ideas were too subtle for Marcus Garvey, they passed through his mind like shooting stars on a clear night, sporadically and without stopping.
Often, injustice is revealed when the just suffer an unforeseen misfortune. It can also be exposed by the opposite: when fate bestows unexpected good fortune to the corrupt. Because that seam was bountiful. Every day the
bathtub washed clean more gold. From an average of fifteen ounces a day it had become eighteen, then twenty, and then twenty-five. And the more gold they extracted, the more earth the Cravers demanded the miners remove.
Sometimes they would yell at Marcus to come and help inside the mine. Every day the space widened and someone was needed to help direct the work of installing wooden beams.
He realised that the inner landscape had gone through great changes since his last visit. The bubble was now wider. More, larger holes appeared on the walls. Marcus stopped in front of the tunnel through which Amgam had come into the world. Its mouth was wider. Due to the miners’ work? No. They picked uniformly in every direction. When they loosened earth the only thing they did was leave uncovered the pre-existing tunnels, which widened as they went further into the earth.
The miners didn’t need much instruction to position the beams. Since no one was paying much attention to him, Marcus took the opportunity to approach the largest of all the holes. He lit a match. That little weak light only illuminated a few feet of the tunnel. Enough to see some sort of tube that had the relief patterns of the roof of someone’s mouth. Further on, the tunnel twisted like a worm heading into the earth. He suddenly felt air on his face. Just as he wondered if that wind was the product of his imagination, the match blew out. But if the tunnel went into the earth, how was it possible that a gust of wind could come out of there? Marcus didn’t ask himself anything else. The memory of Mr Tecton was too distressing. When he got out of the mine he was happy.
In that period, the two brothers’ normal mood was euphoria. The mine was bringing them closer to their own particular social revenge. William wanted to buy himself a bank. Richard, an army. And euphoria, often, expresses itself through volcanic resentment. At night they got drunk, shouted and shot their revolvers into the air. More than once Marcus feared that a bullet would come through the tent canvas and injure him or Pepe.
The Africans were turning into some sort of Negro Nibelungs. And I don’t intend that as a metaphor. The Cravers had brought a gramophone close to the anthill to which they attached a speaker shaped like a giant carnation. Wagner was what was most listened to. The mosquitoes of the clearing wrestled with the music, excited into a state of insanity, and attacked the men like small flesh projectiles. But William was convinced that the music motivated the miners. It goes without saying that a few lashes of the whip also contributed, and not in small part, to the acceleration of the work pace.
Each day they worked harder, each day more gold was extracted and the mine grew larger. The following fortnight, a false, but tangible, peace reigned. It was as if the mine and the two brothers, encouraged by common interests, had decided to row in the same direction. And, as a result, it was no longer clear if the Craver brothers had found the mine or the mine had found the Craver brothers.
Meanwhile Marcus lived in another world. He had first tasted love there, in the jungle, with her, with Amgam. The Congo was a strange place. A place where pain and pleasure came together and became superimposed, just like the organic layers of humus.
The Cravers’ obsession for gold created many rifts that made them avoid each other for long periods. The daily routine was unbelievably monotonous. William spurred on the miners as if they were oxen tied to a plough, driving them to extract more dirt, more gold, while Richard supervised the workers at the bathtub. Marcus’s basic obligation was to cook the Craver brothers’ meals and the miners’ mess. Often, when he had already cooked William and Richard’s delicacies, he left the large pot boiling and went into the jungle to a corner he and Amgam had agreed on earlier.
Marcus wouldn’t have traded one of those times with Amgam for all the Craver brothers’ gold. She made him touch her; she took Marcus’s hands and placed them on her body. She also touched him, she knew no shame. The first few times she embraced him with that hot skin, Marcus had the feeling that he would burn like an apple in the oven. And at first he didn’t find the way Amgam loved him pleasant at all. He felt like an animal manipulated by veterinarians. It was as if she was saying: do that, do it like this. And Marcus wondered: is that normal, is it always like this?
Very quickly though, that apparently crude contact revealed an erotic finesse. She stopped guiding him much sooner than he could have imagined. He investigated her body with as much insolence as she had examined his days earlier, perhaps even more. Each time they got together Marcus discovered a different layer of pleasure. And one day he said to himself, ‘Great God Almighty, before this woman and I exhaust all the possible pleasures, a single woodworm could eat all the wood in the Congo.’
Understandably, Marcus’s accounts caused me a double-edged discomfort. He never held back, his stories were filled with verbal abandon. We have to keep in mind that Victorian morality was still in effect. Now it might seem unbelievable, but in that period the social rules of the well off recommended that the words ‘leg’ or ‘arm’ only be used for a good reason, as they were immodest. I didn’t know anything about life. And I had Marcus Garvey in front of me, loaded down with chains, but telling me of moans and shivers with an expansive freedom that I wouldn’t have been able to find in the most pornographic fiction. It was as if that man, after the Congo, had forgotten that life and sex are separated by the walls of civilisation. And all I could do was take notes with a sporadic smile on my lips.
It didn’t take much effort for me to imagine them. A little gypsy like Marcus Garvey in the heart of a tropical jungle, drenched in sweat, embracing a woman with skin like snow but of a temperature five or six degrees higher than ours. The second source of my discomfort, naturally, was that I was forced to listen to the details of that singular love, a love that I wanted to have lived but I was only allowed to transcribe. They were lovers, and I was just a typist who couldn’t get over it.
In any case, furtive love has its inconveniences. Marcus worried that William and Richard might discover that the two absences were related. He didn’t even want to imagine William’s revenge. And he also worried about Amgam. Before or after making love she demanded that he pay her attention. Sometimes she even grabbed him by the wrist and made him sit up so that he would be more attentive. She wanted to explain something very important to him, yes, but what? He didn’t understand her. Marcus felt like a dog that was trying to learn: the dog knows that he is faced with a superior intelligence, but he is incapable of understanding what is expected of him. Amgam always took the initiative: sit, listen to what I’m telling you, do you understand, do you understand? It’s important that you understand it! Amgam spoke and gestured, she was as often vehement as she was slow and explicit, and Marcus didn’t understand a thing. The Tecton language had extraordinarily rich phonetics. When she spoke with a thousand vowels it was impossible to retain a single word. Other times, though, Amgam’s voice slid with the descending tone of an hourglass.
With great effort, and even more imagination, Marcus tried to decipher her gesticulation. But all his efforts never amounted to more than pure speculation. One day he thought he understood a completely different story: that Amgam had travelled there impelled by the desire to get to know other forms of life. Marcus laughed. No, not that. It was obvious that he would never admit that. What interest could the Cravers’ life have, or the Negroes, or his? The routine in the clearing, the slavery in the mine? Anyway, the reasons that had brought her to our world were anecdotal. Amgam’s real interest was in communicating some other idea to him, something much more urgent. She kept insisting on it. And Marcus, desperate, naked, could only grab his head with both hands and whine, ‘What do you want, beloved? What do you want? What are you trying to tell me?’
A few days later the noises inside the mine returned. Everyone was sleeping and at midnight they were woken up by screams.
‘Champagne, champagne, champagne!’ was the outcry that spilled from the mine’s hole.
William, Richard, Marcus and Pepe came out of their tents at almost exactly the same time.
‘Now
what’s going on?’ said Richard.
‘It better be important or I’ll cut off their tongues with the meat scissors,’ said William.
When all four reached the anthill, Pepe quietened the miners with a dry shout. The Negroes’ language could boom louder than a whip, recalled Marcus. Then he asked them why they were shouting.
‘Noises,’ translated Pepe. ‘The noises again.’
‘Banging.’
William was very sleepy and those damn Negroes had woken him up. He rubbed his eyes. Marcus thought he would pull out the revolver, that he would shoot it into the air, or even worse, at someone. But William was unpredictable. His response deserved a place in some anthology of mental aberrations.
‘Tell them to fill their ears with damp dirt. It will make a plug and that way they won’t hear anything.’
And he went back to his tent!
According to Marcus, as implausible as it may seem, the tactic worked. Prisoners and children have many things in common: the Negroes shouted because no one paid attention to them; they got no response and finally, like children that cry and aren’t comforted, they grew tired. And, of course, no matter what they did they couldn’t get out of the mine without the ladder.
The next day, though, all of their faces reflected that consumption that constant fear creates. William understood that the Negroes needed a few words of comfort.
‘Listen to me, everyone!’ he shouted at them. ‘The jungle is filled with noises. The noises never hurt anyone. I don’t want any more nights of screaming!’
A new workday was beginning. Richard took William to one side. Even still, Marcus could hear what they were saying.
‘You’re not fooling anybody, William,’ said Richard in a soft voice. ‘Every time they’ve heard noises something was going on. That’s the truth.’
‘An old man and a girl,’ said William. ‘That’s the only thing that’s happened.’