‘I’ve never seen anything like those people. They’re not normal. And you know it.’
‘Don’t be an idiot. They can’t come from underground. There must be some explanation that’s so simple we haven’t even realised it.’
Richard shook his head sadly. ‘For the love of God, William. You’ve seen it more than anyone, you’ve slept with her. You sleep with her! Maybe there is some simple explanation, as simple as this one: that in the Congo there are people who live under the ground. Who knows what else is hiding down there?’
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ yelled William with the beginnings of rage in his voice. ‘Strange things are happening, that’s true. But this is Africa, Richard, Africa! Strange things happen here. The Negroes are black. Have they kept us from getting to the gold? No. We’ve seen a white old man and a girl. You want us to give up because of that, Richard? Of course not!’ William changed his tone. He placed an arm on his brother’s shoulder. ‘This is our opportunity. We are making a fortune! I don’t plan on going back when I’m making so much money. And neither should you.’
Richard sat with the rifle between his knees. He hugged the butt of the weapon. Seconds later he admitted, ‘Maybe you’re right. What else could happen?’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
And they joined in a very intense embrace. It was the only time that Marcus saw true brotherhood between the Craver brothers. Then William pinched Richard’s cheeks lovingly. ‘And now go and take care of the tub. Or maybe you want the monkeys to see us arguing?’
Marcus didn’t wait long at all. The first chance he got he took Amgam to the jungle. He pulled her by the elbow and kept looking behind them. When he was sure they were alone, he spoke.
‘That was it, what you wanted to tell me, wasn’t it?’
She didn’t understand.
‘Amgam!’ Marcus tried to draw the mine in the air. ‘Who’s down there? Who? Are they your friends? Do you know them? What you wanted to say was that your friends, sooner or later, would come up.’
But that time she was the one who didn’t understand. Amgam’s eyes moved as if they were trying to follow a fly in flight. They went from Marcus’s hands to his lips, and back. Marcus motioned her to sit on the grass and joined her. He spoke very slowly. He pointed to the ground with his finger and said, ‘Friends? Of yours? Your Pepes underground?’
‘Pepe …’ she understood finally.
Marcus smiled.
‘Yes, of course, that’s it. Pepe, Pepe, Pepe! Amgam’s Pepes.’
But she was silent. She didn’t share Marcus’s joy. In fact, quite the opposite. Her face looked like a granite screen. She stood up with a jolt. She was so tall! Marcus was still at ground level and she stood before him, thin, infinitely tall, reaching up to the clouds like an ivory tower.
‘Champagne!’ shouted Amgam. She moved her arms up and down to emphasise her words. ‘Champagne! Champagne! Champagne!’
Marcus leapt up. He was afraid that they would hear them from the camp and he covered her mouth with his hand.
That day Marcus couldn’t explain any more to me. Our time was up and the guards ordered him to stand.
‘People use the word “fear” too loosely,’ he said while they searched him to make sure I hadn’t given him anything. ‘Children fear the dark; women fear mice; men fear their bosses. People are afraid that the price of bread will rise or that there’ll be a war. But that’s not fear. And in order to know what fear is, it’s not enough to have heard it talked about.’
Marcus was already in the hallway. The two guards escorted him, one held him at each elbow. He continued talking. That day he talked until he disappeared from the hallway, calmly, like an orchestra playing on a sinking ship. With his neck turned, as he got further away, he was still telling me, ‘Amgam shouted “Champagne, champagne, champagne!” and when I was covering her mouth I knew that for the first time in her life she was afraid. I mean, really afraid. Do you understand me, Mr Thomson? Do you understand what I mean?’
As I headed back to the boarding house I convinced myself that the book was beyond my abilities. I walked aimlessly, having a discussion with myself. How could anyone describe all of Marcus’s horror and all of his love, there beside Amgam and awaiting the Tecton? It was impossible. That story couldn’t be made into a book. At least not by me. On the other hand, the book was getting too big. It was bigger than me, than Norton, than Marcus himself. I had to finish it. It didn’t even matter whether I was talented enough or not, just like no one asks a soldier if he’s brave enough to complete a mission. I didn’t get back to the boarding house until it was dark. There I bumped into Mr MacMahon. Unexpectedly, because it was late at night and MacMahon was very strict about his schedule. He was sitting in the dining room accompanied by a half-empty bottle of cheap whisky. He told me that his wife was sick. And he, so far away, could do nothing to help her. It wasn’t so much the seriousness of the illness that worried him, but that the poor woman had to continue taking care of the children. I drank a whisky, in solidarity. I refilled his glass, and mine too. I drank too much. MacMahon couldn’t help his wife and I couldn’t help Marcus Garvey. Since I was a little tipsy I spoke with the voice of a little frog, ‘Well, you don’t know the worst of it.’
‘Oh no?’ answered MacMahon after a long pause. He too was staring absently at his glass.
‘No, you don’t know it. It’s very likely that soon all humanity will be wiped out by a murderous race.’
‘Is that so?’ said MacMahon, indifferently. He jerked his head up and down as if he were digesting the news. He scratched the short thick hair, like a wild dog’s, that covered the nape of his neck, and he asked dispassionately, ‘And there’s no way we can stop them?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ And after thinking it over a bit I stated, ‘No, not a chance. We’ll be pulverised, annihilated, snuffed out. The human race will become dust in the winds of time. Not even ruins will remain to show that we ever existed.’
We immersed ourselves in the contemplation of our glasses.
‘Maybe we don’t deserve any better …’ I philosophised. ‘It’ll all be over.’
MacMahon nodded. I wasn’t expecting a prudent proletariat like him to say, ‘And to hell with it!’
He was right. One day we would be exterminated, by the Tecton or by time, sooner or later. We would all disappear. Us, those that depended on us, those who haven’t yet been born and who one day would have to depend on those that now depend on us. Everybody.
‘And to hell with it!’ I said.
‘And to hell with it!’ said MacMahon.
Laughter came out of me like a hiccup. And it spread to MacMahon. Everything would go to hell any day now. And thinking about it, suddenly, was funny.
We laughed so hard that the other boarders shouted at us from their rooms to shut up. We couldn’t stop. The boarders’ doors became drums. They made me think of the tom-tom drums in the jungles of Doctor Flag. They announced the big news. To hell with it! We laughed till the whisky ran out. Then we went to bed. What could we do? The Tecton were about to invade the world. But our whisky was all gone. These things happen.
TWELVE
THE NEXT FEW DAYS set everyone’s nerves on edge. The screams that came out of the mine at night were a thermometer of the noises within. Some nights the racket didn’t stop until daybreak. William didn’t want to deal with it at all. He ordered Marcus and Pepe to take care of the incidents at night. They were only to notify him in case of a real emergency.
Marcus couldn’t stand waking up with nightmares. Now he found out there was something worse: waking up for other people’s nightmares. He could only sleep for a little while, until the explosions of howls ravaged his mind. The sound travelled from the mine’s opening and spread through the clearing. There were one hundred mouths shrieking desperately, like pigs that had a knife to the neck. Marcus opened his eyes, disconcerted, terrified, wet with a sickly sweat. His numb brain had trouble accepting
what was going on. He learned to ask himself four questions before moving: ‘Who am I? Where am I? Who’s screaming? Why are they waking me up?’ And he answered: ‘I’m Marcus Garvey. I’m in the Congo. I’m an overseer of Negroes. The Negroes are screaming because they’re afraid of a Tecton attack.’ And when he had obtained those four answers he told himself: ‘Calm down, everything’s normal.’
Marcus and Pepe went to the anthill on many occasions. When the shouting exceeded the normal levels they would leave the tent, stick their heads into the mine opening with the rifle at hand and ask the men what was going on.
‘Noises,’ translated Pepe one day. ‘As always.’
‘And they are screaming so much because of that?’ said Marcus.
‘The sound of blows.’
‘Blows, blows, blows …’ cursed Marcus. ‘And doesn’t it seem like a big coincidence that they only hear them at night? They’re just trying to kill us with exhaustion!’
‘They hear them during the day,’ explained Pepe. ‘It’s just that during the day the sound of their work covers them up.’
Marcus snorted. Annoyed, even though he wasn’t sure with whom, he shouted, ‘Push the ladder down! Lower it!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Do what I tell you.’
The ladder fell and Marcus descended. Pepe stayed up above, with his rifle at the ready. Even though the moon was full, Marcus could only see eyes around him, white eyes everywhere. They trembled and moved away from him like a herd of eyes. The mine stunk.
‘Where does this bloody noise come from?’ asked Marcus.
‘To your right, at the back,’ translated Pepe from above. ‘They say that the sound comes from one of the tunnels higher up. Above your head. Do you see it?’
Yes, he saw it. It couldn’t have been long since the excavation of the wall had uncovered this hole. It was round and very high up for someone as short as Marcus. He hung his shotgun on his back and pulled himself up with the strength of his arms.
He felt as if he were sticking half of his body into a whale’s windpipe. But he hated himself for having paid any attention to the Negroes, for not having paid himself any attention, and he shouted, ‘I don’t hear a thing here!’
He was lying. He still hadn’t heard anything, but he was convinced that sooner or later he would hear something. Like when a stone is dropped into a well of unknown depth, the sound of the impact might come earlier or later, but it would always come.
And he heard it. Of course he heard it. The noises came from deep inside, from the depths of the earth. Marcus placed the palm of his hand inside the tunnel. It was vibrating.
At first he thought that all the sounds were one sound. But his ear could soon differentiate layers of sounds. The most grating one reminded him of paper being torn. Below that one he heard some sort of rhythmic echoing, like many horse’s feet on hard sand. And there was even a third sound, harder to define, less precise.
Marcus let himself fall to the mine’s floor and he climbed up the ladder. He moved quickly, that was what gave him away. The Negroes broke the expectant silence they had maintained while Marcus listened to the depths as if with a stethoscope. They started shouting again with fear, and some hands had the audacity to hold him by the shirt, more like shipwrecked men that beg to be let on board a boat than with real aggression. Marcus brushed them off without thinking or stopping. When he was above ground Pepe helped him pull up the ladder.
‘We have to wake up William,’ said Marcus.
He himself took care of it. He sat in front of William’s tent and said, raising his voice a little more each time, ‘William? William?’
The canvas door opened a crack. William was naked. He only wore a thin silver chain around his neck. His light eyes blended very well with the African moonlight. Even Marcus could appreciate the beauty of William’s body, a beauty created to live by night. Marcus saw the silver-coloured pubic hair of the younger Craver brother. And behind him, Amgam, seated as always, with her legs crossed. She wasn’t tied up. Inside him he felt a stab of love and hate in equal parts, the same way that blue and red can co-exist in the same flame. Marcus had thought that William always tied her to the pole so he could take her. Did it really matter if she were tied or untied? Not really. William could rape her when he wanted and how he wanted. What worried Marcus was that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t need to rape her. When he really thought about it, he had no way of knowing what went on inside that tent. It occurred to him that he knew as little about the relationship between William and Amgam as William did about the relationship he had with her. He lowered his eyes, hoping not to betray his feelings.
‘I come from the mine,’ reported Marcus, speaking with his gaze lowered. ‘And there really are noises.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s new about that, Marcus?’ said an irritable William.
‘The noises are very loud.’
He was lying. What was really new was that Marcus had heard them for the first time. But what he was trying to communicate was not a fact, but a fear.
‘How loud?’ replied William sarcastically. ‘Loud as thunder? Loud as a shot from a cannon?’
‘Not that loud,’ said Marcus, a bit disoriented. ‘But they’re there.’
‘So, what do you suggest I do?’
Marcus moved his head from side to side. ‘You told us to let you know. It’s not the sound of a flute. It’s like the sound of a large factory. The Negroes are right.’
William interrupted him. ‘Marcus, the Negroes are never right. Can you understand that?’
‘I suppose so, William,’ said Marcus. ‘The Negroes are never right.’
‘No. You don’t understand. Let me explain something to you: if the Negroes were right they would rule Europe and we would be in the Welsh mines extracting coal for them. But it turns out it’s the opposite; we rule Africa and they work in the gold mines in the Congo, under our orders. Do you understand now, Marcus?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good night.’
And William closed the canvas with an abrupt gesture.
At that point anyone would have been able to see that a horrible threat was approaching. Or better put: rising. Anyone except William and Richard. Marcus felt as much a prisoner of the mine as the Negroes themselves. Or maybe more. They, at least, could complain. He didn’t know what to do. The Craver brothers had created that peculiar atmosphere where the profit outweighed the risk, and they had never asked him if he agreed. Marcus was afraid. Of the mine and of the Cravers. The fear he felt about the mine was too vague to fight against. The fear he felt about the Cravers was worse: the type of fear that pushes the victim to join forces with those who terrorise him.
Then there was Amgam. Marcus was a slave to some sort of contradictory paralysis. Flee together? To where? To the jungle? Into that harsh green ocean? To the Tecton world, where she would be well received? Marcus couldn’t know what lay below the mine and beyond. But whatever it was, it was the last place in the universe he would go of his own free will.
Some nights the Negroes shrieked with a horror that never tired, for hours and hours. Marcus never learned to tell their voices apart. For him they were an anonymous mass that only said: we’re afraid, we want to get out. Or maybe: they’re coming up, they’re very close.
Sometimes he didn’t hear them all night long, who knows why. That unpredictability didn’t ease Marcus’s soul. He was the one who kept watch, he was the one who had to go to the anthill. But nothing ever happened, just the shouts, and the repeated warnings made them lose their effect. Finally Marcus made that mistake, so human and at the same time so cruel, of accusing the victim of the crime. When the Negroes shrieked Marcus cursed them from his tent, jerked Pepe’s elbow and ordered him to go and have a look.
One night the Negroes raised a unanimous and uniform cry. They started at dusk and they didn’t shut up all night. Marcus could only half sleep. He remembered only vaguely
the order of events. When the intensity of the moans became unbearable, he ordered Pepe to see what was going on. Pepe returned without news. The Negroes, though, were shouting again. Even still, precisely because the shouts were continuous, because they maintained a tone of monotonous horror, he was able to fall asleep. Like those who live by a waterfall who become so accustomed to the sound of the water crashing that they end up incorporating it into their dreams.
Very early in the morning he was awakened by the silence. An absolute silence, if there was such a thing as absolute silence in the Congo. No sound came from the mine. His mind had grown accustomed to those hundred throats coordinated by fear. He had grown so accustomed that the silence was novel.
He opened his eyes. Beside him, Pepe also had his eyes open. Pepe looked at the canvas that served as the door. But he looked with the eyes of a mummy, fixed on an eternity beyond his grasp.
‘Pepe?’
Pepe didn’t answer and Marcus followed the direction marked by his gaze, fixed on the canvas door.
There was a round, white, bald head there. The khaki canvas of the tent was opened halfway to show that head with puffy cheeks and eyes round as tennis balls. Just one head, which moved its pupils at full speed, as if it had very little time in which to see everything. The lips traced a letter V, but no one would have called it a smile. The head made a face. It stuck out a violet, triangular tongue. And suddenly it left, as if it had been sucked out.
It was such a fleeting vision that Marcus didn’t even have time to be frightened. He shouted to Pepe, ‘Did you see it? Did you see it?’
Pepe didn’t answer, immobile on his cot. Marcus left the tent.
A plague of human locusts were looting the camp. There were Tectons everywhere. Five, six, ten, twenty, more, much more. He didn’t know how to count them. There must have been more than twenty, but they moved so quickly that he might have counted them twice. Marcus had never seen such frenetic activity. They wore tunics covered with red earth and they searched through everything with very proficient monkey hands. They communicated their findings with incredibly hoarse voices, like cows speaking very quickly. It was hard to believe they were of the same race as Amgam.