‘Just like that. Without even knowing who he was?’
‘Well, yes.’
Shortly after they demobilised me, a very sensational case occurred. A rumour went around that the German fleet had left their ports in battle formation and a convoy that carried a regiment of Senegal ese had been forced to take refuge on the English coast. The Senegalese marksmen were confined to warehouses, waiting for the danger to pass so they could take them to the continent. Who knows how, but they found out that a few weeks earlier another African regiment had been annihilated. They deserted en masse. There were more than a thousand Senegalese fugitives, which started a large-scale hunt. Some of them made it to the streets of London in their wild flight. The newspapers published crazy photographs of English policemen chasing Senegalese marksmen. I reminded MacMahon of the case.
‘Well, it’s possible,’ was his passive response.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I said. ‘In that case you’re hiding a deserter. And that’s a serious crime, very serious.’
But with a tired hand MacMahon waved at the air.
‘It’ll all work out, you’ll see. This war will end one day, and on that day there won’t be heroes or deserters, just the living and the dead. In this house Mr Modepà is not a deserter. He’s the gardener.’
TWENTY-ONE
HE HAD NEVER IMAGINED that there could be such a dark, narrow, long place. He had been moving forward for hours and hours in a caravan of moles. At first he had moved through soft subsoil. The deepest tree roots still appeared at the ceiling of the tunnel, like hairy turnips that brushed his face. Then that earth was replaced by hard granitelike stone, too deep for any life to penetrate.
The corridor was horribly cramped. The walls clung to him like a second skin. His body often met with little splinters that scratched at his flesh like stone nails. He couldn’t raise his head or turn his neck. The only thing he was able to do was push the shell with both hands. Forward, ever forward. Now he understood what those shells were used for. They fitted like projectiles into the bore of a cannon. And their oval shape was optimal for moving through the tunnel. He couldn’t see anything, not a thing. Sometimes, when the corridor widened a few inches, the walls lit up with a gloomy green glow that came from the lanterns the Tectons carried.
He lost all sense of time. He had no idea how long he had been pushing the shell in front of him without pausing or resting. If his rhythm slowed, William’s shell, behind him, threatened to break his feet. The tunnel led them downwards. For as much winding as they were doing, it was obvious that they were descending. Their wrists and ankles had been worked to the bone. Their elbows and knees were raw. And the heat. The air had become denser and the temperature had increased. It was a homogenous heat with no centre, that sucked the air out of them and melted their flesh.
More than the pain and the exhaustion, what really plagued him was the anxiety. He breathed like a fish out of water. He had the feeling that at any moment his heart would explode like a bomb. He couldn’t take it anymore. He stopped.
‘Go!’ shouted William desperately from behind him. ‘When you stop they hit my toes with their clubs!’
They continued. They were going down in a spiral. At a certain point he heard sobs. They came from William.
‘Are you all right?’ said Marcus.
‘All right?’ William’s voice was the cry of a sheep. And he added, with trembling, broken vowels, ‘Just months ago I was in my father’s mansion. Now I’m in a crack where a lizard wouldn’t even fit. I’ve lost a gold mine, Richard is dead and they are taking me to hell. How can I be all right?’
They had no way of knowing when that torture would end. Marcus noticed that, in front of him, a Tecton foot kicked at his shell to shut him up. He still said, in a whisper, ‘They won’t kill us. Before we went into the tunnel I saw them filling the shells with things from the camp and the clearing. They must be samples to take home. They need us to transport these things.’ He let out an ironic groan. ‘Who knows, maybe we’re samples too.’
William was crying. He was crying so hard that Marcus wasn’t at all sure that he had heard him. For a long time, hours and hours, he listened to William’s childish tears. He also heard the Tectons swearing, as they pierced William’s feet to spur him on. They continued their descent. Further and further in, deeper and deeper. Marcus fainted, or half fainted. But even after losing consciousness he still pushed the shell. He pushed and pushed. Then came an order to halt. Was it a moment’s rest? The night’s sleep? There was no way to know. He dozed off, with his arms still extended. He couldn’t do it in any other position: the corridor was too narrow to allow him any movement.
Minutes later, or maybe hours, he was awakened by a shriek from William. The Tectons must have pricked him again, because Marcus felt William’s shell pushing at his feet. And the journey resumed.
He was hungry. But the thirst was worse than the hunger, and the heat of the stones reinforced his suffering. He was dying of thirst. Marcus even went so far as to rip off the scabs from his forehead so blood would gush down onto his face and he could lick it. ‘Think, Marcus, think,’ he told himself, ‘if you are so hungry and so thirsty, and we’ve stopped once, it must be more than a day.’ He concluded that they couldn’t continue that way forever. Even the Tectons, who weren’t pushing shells and were protected by their armour, couldn’t last much longer.
He heard a Tecton shout, and it seemed that the shout was directed at him. But it wasn’t an order to stop – the caravan continued moving – or a threat, and it didn’t seem like an insult either. What was he warning him about, then? He didn’t understand until he realised that the green lantern was projecting a ray of light onto the ceiling. He looked up, without stopping his pushing, and saw some sort of bread, flat and round, hanging from the ceiling. The Tectons that preceded him had left it there. It was a thin enough slice so that the shell, even though it was fitted to the passageway, could get through without dragging it along.
There were two pieces, he grabbed one and shouted, ‘William! The ceiling!’
He heard William’s sobs, this time from happiness. Even more things began to appear on the ceiling. Some sort of lettuce leaves, two. The bread tasted of millet; the leaves had a high liquid content, sucking them calmed their thirst. They were so thirsty that William received the leaf with more joy than the bread. However, Marcus was smart enough to realise the downside: if they were being fed it was because they had a long journey planned. Very long.
They ate and drank without stopping. Maybe it had been two days that they had been slithering through the tunnel. Only two? More bread and leaves again. It didn’t make for very solid nourishment. They grew weak. But all of a sudden, when their bodies were turning into snakes, they emptied out into an open space. A howl of happiness escaped from Marcus’s lips. They had stopped in an air bubble. A place where they could change positions and relax their muscles! He laughed like a madman. And at the same time he realised that the reason for all that happiness, that euphoria, was a space that couldn’t have been even six cubic feet.
Behind Marcus appeared William’s shell, and behind the shell, William himself. The Tectons that had already entered threatened them with shouts and clubs. They made the Englishmen lie down with their hands on the backs of their necks. Soon the two Tectons that brought up the rear of the caravan entered.
They were inside a stone dome. A total of six bodies sharing a fox den, back to back. Marcus would never have thought that so many people could fit into so little space. He only had to stretch out his arm to touch the Tecton furthest from him. But now, after days of dragging himself through an underground chimney, he felt as if he had entered a dance hall. The Tectons knew the environment well. They were very skilled at stretching themselves in such a limited area. The silence of the stone was punctuated by a rustling of flesh that made one think of wet, taut nautical ropes. They rolled their necks and stretched their muscles, slowly, turning their appendages as if they were
flowers opening. And, as a result shaking loose most of the crust of dirt stuck to their white armour, now covered with a layer of ochre.
The pause gave them a few minutes to reflect. There were two lanterns, each one stuffed with those luminescent little worms, which projected a weak green light onto the stone and the bodies. William looked downcast. A shark in a fishtank. Within him there still dwelled some sort of life, but in a state of suspension. Marcus tried to encourage him. Impossible. At the first word a Tecton hit him in the lips with one of those horrible clubs. William turned his neck, and looked him in the eyes. What Marcus saw scared him. Two cheeks like two funnels, sucked in; the unblinking eyes of a dried, stuffed animal. And lips with cracks that looked like slices from an axe.
William spoke with a voice that was not his own. As if he were already dead and he was communicating with the world through a spirit medium. Through those broken, cracked lips, a single word filtered out, whistled.
‘Champagne.’
Three days later. (It’s an estimate I made based on the caravan’s pauses. Marcus assured me that during the entire trip he was absolutely incapable of calculating the passage of time.) The stone intestine that they hauled themselves through began to expand. The ceiling rose progressively, the sides of the corridor no longer scraped at their ribs. Yet the difficulties they had to face were no less. First of all, the geography. Now the passageway made a much steeper descent, with slopes of up to forty degrees. For long periods they advanced face down. Blood accumulated in their brains, causing fleeting hallucinations. Marcus saw some glowing green goblins passing through the rock, like small souls in the form of match flames. The goblins came through the rock like our ghosts go through walls and they happily greeted the underground travellers. The brain fever had another, more dangerous side effect. Preoccupied, his mind filled with blood, William’s shell often slipped from his hands and crashed against Marcus’s ankles. The shells were heavy, crammed with baggage. Marcus, in turn, would panic, thinking he might lose his grip on his shell too. He didn’t want to even consider the retaliation of the Tecton who was ahead of him.
Then, the heat. It was enough to make one doubt whether they were travelling towards the centre of the Earth or towards the sun. Marcus felt he was breathing hot ash. He was sure his liver and his kidneys would melt. But all he could do was push the shell and keep quiet.
The ceiling rose a little higher each day. For the pauses, now, the Tectons chose wider spots, cavities where they could at least sit. They watched the Englishmen. The Tectons slept in shifts. There was always someone awake acting as a guard. Marcus had noticed one of the Tectons in particular. He had the thick-lidded eyes of an idiot. He was also, by far, the fattest of the four, big as a gorilla. While they were in the narrowest part of the tunnel he had always been at the head of the caravan. His helmet and the reinforced shoulders of his armour made him scrape off all the things that stuck out, like a human drill. He often gave beatings in an erratic, unpredictable way, to show that he was in charge. While all the other Tectons slept, when he was left alone with the two humans, he was never quite sure that he was fully in control of the situation. Not even with a club in his hand. He looked at one, then the other, turning his head with the obsessive movements of a hen.
During his shift they took the opportunity to talk.
‘I stuck my hand into my shell and all that’s in there are worthless trifles,’ whispered William. ‘It’s incredible. They’re only interested in silly objects. Look at that bastard.’
He was referring to the gorilla Tecton, who wore a crucifix hanging from his waist.
‘That iron cross was Richard’s,’ continued William. ‘And he uses it as if it were a sword. They’re a ghastly race.’
‘Don’t do it again,’ said Marcus, interrupting him.
‘Don’t do what?’
‘Go through the shells. Think about that Negro.’
‘What Negro?’ asked William.
‘The one that looked at the bottle of formol with a beetle inside.’ And he insisted, ‘Don’t rummage through the shell.’
The Tecton demanded silence with a threatening growl. They were lucky that of those four there was one who was such an idiot, because for the last few days they had been watched more carefully. The vigilance increased in parallel to the possibilities of the terrain. Now, at times, they could even stand up. The next few days became a re-enactment of prehistoric man: each day they could rise up a bit more, like hominids advancing towards bipedalism. As for the cave that surrounded them, Marcus compared the landscape to the inside of a whale. Beneath their feet there even appeared steps, which were reminiscent of the ribs of a cetacean. They went down and down, now without spiral turns.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ said Marcus.
‘What do you mean?’ said William irascibly.
‘It’s not as muggy.’
It was true. During the last twenty-four hours (another approximation of mine) the temperature had lowered a few degrees. That didn’t make sense. According to William, who was better educated, the increase in depth should have been proportional to the heat. It frightened them to think of the thousands and thousands of tons of rock that there must have been over their heads. But the temperature, contrary to all logic, was decreasing.
Since the space allowed it, William and Marcus slept like polar dogs, with one’s body curled round the other’s. In that subterranean world where only night existed, the hours of sleep were the night, and William and Marcus held each other as if the other’s body had become a child’s blanket that protected them from all their fears. It was the fraternity of prisoners, for whom the closeness of death wiped clean memories and miseries. One night Marcus heard William talking. He wasn’t at all sure whether he was trying to tell him something or if he was just talking in his sleep. ‘And the Congo was my idea … mine … mine …’ It was simply incredible to hear those words coming from William Craver’s mouth. And Marcus thought that something good must come out of hell, or the road to hell, if it was capable of bringing someone like William Craver closer to being human.
The next day they were awakened with kicks. The Tectons ordered them to stop pushing the shells and to start carrying them on their backs. The space now permitted it. They had stood up, and Marcus thought that it was a good time to give his companion a gift.
While they were adjusting their enormous shells, Marcus diverted himself by studying the route they would follow. Now the worm lanterns became useful. The more space there was, the more light the walls reflected. Directly ahead, the stone tunnel stopped in front of a wall with five, six, maybe seven holes.
‘Let’s take note of the route they choose,’ whispered Marcus.
William snorted. ‘Why? We’re never going back,’ he moaned. ‘My God, my God! Does your shell weigh as much as mine? How far do they expect us to get, with these on our backs?’
The Tectons interrupted the conversation with their clubs. The severity of those blows told them that from that day on it would be absolutely forbidden for them to open their mouths. Marcus shot a look at William, a look that said: look at my hand and don’t take your eyes off of it.
Marcus was ahead of William. He was walking with his right fist closed. When he had the opportunity he opened it, a fleeing instant, just enough time for William to glimpse the five bullets. Marcus had removed them from inside his shell, going against his own advice. This act made William regain hope. It also had other consequences. William Craver couldn’t stop being William Craver. Actually, during that brief interlude, he hadn’t been a better man. He simply hadn’t been a man. But now an unforeseen element appeared: five revolver bullets.
Making up his mind with impressive speed, William banged his chest against the shell that Marcus carried on his back and set him off balance. He pretended it was an accident, but it was an excuse to discreetly get close to Marcus’s hand. William forced Marcus’s closed fingers open with his own. The Tectons shouted, angry with these clumsy creatures wh
o tripped even when they could finally walk without difficulty. Marcus felt William’s fingers jabbing at his hand. What could he do? The Tectons would take two seconds, three at most, to work out the real reason behind the stumble. They would see the stolen bullets, their last chance. It was suicidal blackmail. If they were discovered they would both suffer the retribution. But William didn’t care about the consequences. He had employed a similar strategy with the bank’s board of directors, but something had gone wrong. This time he pulled it off.
Marcus had no choice but to open his fingers. The bullets changed owners.
At bedtime William curled around him like the previous nights. But now he curled in even closer. Opening his lips inside Marcus’s ear, he commanded him harshly, ‘Now we need a revolver. Look for it!’
Marcus was horrified. William had not only appropriated the ammunition, he was now demanding that Marcus risk his life rummaging around inside the shells.
When the Tectons covered all the lanterns except one with rags William moved away from Marcus. One inch, two inches, three inches. And William fell asleep with his fist tightly closed.
TWENTY-TWO
THE UNDERGROUND LANDSCAPE APPEARED before them with a dead beauty. They no longer had any ceiling above them. The green light couldn’t reach all the way up to that stone ceiling, further above their heads with each step. They went deep into a passageway that twisted and turned, always downward, and not even a palm’s span wide.
The caravan came to a stop. A Tecton was adjusting one of the lanterns. Marcus had wondered how so many little worms could survive so long inside a bag. Now he had the answer: eating each other. There was only one worm left, longer and thicker than a sausage. The Tecton took it out of the bag. The worm wriggled and flapped. It let off a fantastic light: inside its body, the light of all its fellow worms gathered, amplified.