Pandora in the Congo

  So that had been William Craver’s end. A senseless ending? It depends. We might speculate that William’s death indirectly saved Marcus’s life: that William’s murder served to mollify the local tribes’ desire for revenge, thus allowing Marcus to cross that immense region safely.

  Eventually, Marcus came upon a wood cabin beside a wide river. Scattered on the narrow pier lay dozens of Negroes. They must have been waiting for the arrival of a boat to load it with the rubber that was piled up on the bank.

  The last thing they were expecting was a white man to come up from behind, from the forest. They saw him and all jumped up in surprise at the same time. One ran into the cabin to let someone know. A tall sweaty Belgian with red skin came out of the cabin armed with a shotgun.

  ‘Mon Dieu! C’est pas possible!’ shouted the Belgian, lowering his weapon. ‘Where have you come from? I thought there was not a white man for five hundred miles!’

  He invited Marcus into the cabin, and offered him a beer that he took out from the bottom of a box that no one had touched in quite some time. It was a dirty bottle, covered with dust and cobwebs. But it was a Belgian beer, it was civilisation, and before the first sip could reach his throat, Marcus was already back in Europe.

  ‘And this is where it all ends?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marcus. ‘This is where it all ends. Later, once I was in London, they accused me of killing the Cravers and stealing the diamonds.’ He made a gesture that brought his shoulders closer to his ears. ‘How could I explain that the diamonds were two tears from a Tecton woman?’

  That time Marcus didn’t look around agitatedly. His eyes were fixed on some distant point, a spot that the walls of the prison could never block. I didn’t dare say anything more.

  There are silences that announce to us that a terrible event is now history. The entire prison fell silent – the inmates must have been transferred elsewhere; perhaps it was meal time or exercise time. But I wanted to believe that the prison, the prison itself, was listening to us, that the end of the story forced it to hold its breath.

  ‘Time’s up!’ said Sergeant Long Back, opening the iron door with a loud screech.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE YEARS FOLLOWING MY return from the front had little substance. I was writing and visiting Garvey, as much to polish the book as to boost his morale. The MacMahons’ friendship and indulgence were endless. They asked nothing of me, and if I helped them with small tasks it was of my own volition. I didn’t have to worry about money. I wrote and wrote, and my existence was as monotonous as a monk’s, so there’s not much to tell about that period. That the war with Marie Antoinette continued, perhaps.

  I discovered that she liked to sniff shoe polish. If someone left a jar open she would spend hours with her beak inside it. The smell made her somewhat intoxicated, I think, because afterwards she moved in S shapes. I kindly offered to polish all the shoes in the house. My intention, it goes without saying, was not honourable. I sat on a stool surrounded by shoes and with a large jar of black polish open wide and in plain view.

  I could see her peeking out from behind the door, observing me, her worst enemy, consumed by her vice. Finally the little beast could take it no longer and she approached, trusting that the task of shining shoes would absorb my attention.

  As if it needs saying, that was exactly what I had been waiting for. I attacked her just as she plunged her beak into the polish. A good scrape of the brush along her bare back and Marie Antoinette turned into a Zulu turtle, blacker than coal. She fled with angry leaps.

  Of course, in this campaign of guile and strategy, Marie Antoinette always counter-attacked. She decided to pee on my bed. For those who don’t know, I should say that the stench emitted by turtle urine is only comparable to an omelette of rotten eggs sautéed with sea debris. When I least expected it I opened the door to my room and found the miniature deviant lying flat on the mattress, little tail erect and a stream of piss coming out from under her. I had taken a hundred precautions, locks and bolts included. All useless. Sooner or later Marie Antoinette took advantage of some distraction and managed to infiltrate, piss and run. If that sounds funny, I can only wish that one evening, after a long day of work, you get in bed and find your pillow sprayed with turtle urine. In short, once again the war against Marie Antoinette had arrived at a stalemate.

  The only relevant aspect of that period was my relationship with Mr Modepà. It turned out that I knew more French than anyone else at the boarding house, so I became the official interpreter. From the very beginning, though, I kept our conversations to practical concerns. I told him the gardening tasks he had to perform and that was it. I didn’t like him, no matter what Mr MacMahon said. He was an efficient gardener, and a perfect toy for MacMahon’s children, who adored him. He even got along with Marie Antoinette, but there were a few things about him that bothered me. For example, with the MacMahons and me he maintained an unnecessarily disciplined attitude. At first MacMahon tried to get him to relax the formalities. It was hopeless. His Irish cordiality came up against rigid habits that were too entrenched. Modepà was more like a sergeant than a simple colonial soldier. We all became resigned to it. After all, if someone is happier following orders than making friends, that’s up to him. But, something inside me told me that I shouldn’t trust him. One day in the garden, I confronted him.

  ‘You must have noticed,’ I began, ‘that Mr and Mrs MacMahon are much fonder of you and more generous with you than I am.’

  He didn’t say anything. I continued.

  ‘You’re hiding out, aren’t you? Who are you hiding from?’

  ‘I’m not hiding,’ was his response. ‘I’m just waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I am not authorised to talk about it.’

  ‘You’re waiting for the end of the war, aren’t you? Well, you should know that war crimes have no statute of limitations,’ I lied, to frighten him. And I shouted in my most melodramatic French, ‘Jamais!’

  But my speech didn’t affect him in the slightest, and he shut down like a deaf crab.

  ‘Are you wanted?’ I insisted. ‘By whom? God or man?’

  ‘No,’ was his reply, as indignant as it was laconic. But all of a sudden, he corrected himself. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You won’t!’ I accused him. And in the face of the silence that followed, I assured him, ‘You should know that I don’t believe a word you say.’

  Subsequently, on a few occasions, I raised the topic again, or better put, the interrogation, and I always came up against that circumspect tone. From my point of view people who speak in spirals are either conmen or impostors. Most likely, Modepà was both. I was keeping a close eye on him.

  As for the book, at the end of 1917 the second version was practically ready. Before writing the last chapter, though, I decided to subject the entire text to a careful, measured, critical reading. My conclusion? The book was worthless.

  That same evening we had dinner in high spirits. There was no special reason for it. Life was good. The MacMahons were happy. And they had a gang of children. Why shouldn’t we celebrate it? After dinner we shared a drink while MacMahon and Modepà competed at singing. (MacMahon sang Irish songs because that was what he wanted to sing, and Modepà sang African songs because MacMahon had ordered him to.) Mrs MacMahon stood by, lavishing attention on them. Every time she brought something to the table her husband gave her a ‘thank you, my love’ and ate her up with his eyes.

  I still couldn’t get over seeing them married. And watching them, witnessing that tranquil oasis they had created, I could only applaud them.

  As I stood by the stove, MacMahon noticed that I was using a lot of paper to light it. He asked me what I was doing.

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just burning something.’

  That ‘nothing’ was an entire year’s work. The failed second version of the book. But I did the right thing. I was no longer sorr
y about destroying what had to be destroyed. And now I was driven by fanatical willpower. I could have rewritten the book a thousand times, one after the other, without pausing or resting. I knew Marcus Garvey’s story so well that I was guided by a sleepwalker’s certainty. I could never hold Amgam in my arms. But I could write about how Marcus held her in his.

  In the end, the question is how did I finally, almost a year later, finish the third and definitive version of the story of Amgam and Marcus Garvey.

  I became very sentimental. And what was it exactly about that book that made me so emotional? It’s beauty? No. Beauty is fickle: this book I am writing now is the same story that I wrote sixty years ago, and they couldn’t be more different. Was it the truth? No, not that either. From the day I had jotted down the first note on Marcus’s story in the Congo up until the day I sat looking at an enormous pack of bound pages, I had listened to millions of his words. We had gone over every scene until we were worn out. And in each version Marcus added or suppressed some detail. How could I know which of the versions was closest to the real truth of everything that had happened in the Congo? Marcus’s memory wasn’t infallible. It was a memory like any other, that modified the contours of the facts as time passed. My notes often contradicted themselves, and when I asked him to clarify he only added to the confusion. I couldn’t criticise him. The same thing happened to me, because the book was now part of my memory and, as a result, I added and took things out with the same bastardising mechanisms. Besides the three definitive versions, I had rewritten each page dozens of times. If we were to compare the first page I wrote on an episode with the final, definitive one, I’m quite sure we’d find as many variations there as in Marcus’s oral accounts. It wasn’t out of a deliberate desire to alter the original. It was, simply, that the style became the interpreter of the contents.

  What I was interested in assessing was not so much what Marcus had explained to me as what he had wanted to explain to me. The book elevated flesh and blood people to the category of literary characters. It was irrelevant whether they had said a specific phrase or not. Whether they had shot one bullet more or less. What mattered wasn’t what the characters in that story did, but rather what history did with those characters. The trial could go badly and they could hang Garvey, or maybe a bomb from a zeppelin could turn Norton and me into ash. But while there were still readers, Amgam and Marcus would continue making love up there in that tree. All I could do was explain it, and that was exactly what I had done. The only thing I regret is that it was someone else’s story. That I had had to turn myself into a parasite of someone else’s experiences to write a good story. Still, nothing’s perfect.

  I wanted to have a smoke, but I had run out of cigarettes. I left my room. Mr MacMahon was still playing with three of his children, on top of and below an armchair in the dining room. I asked him to lend me a few shillings and I went out to buy some tobacco. It was night; it had rained. The streets were empty and they smelled of fresh stone. All the places where you could buy cigarettes were closed. Fortunately, I stumbled upon one of the children that sell them on the streets. He had fallen asleep on a corner with the box of cigarettes as a pillow. It gave him a good scare when I woke him up. I went back home, smoking. The street was incredibly silent. It was very pleasant filling my lungs with that mix of damp air and tobacco smoke. I felt empty and clean like a soap bubble.

  What does it matter that I went out to buy tobacco that evening? I don’t really know. But after so much time my memory floats like the ghost of a jellyfish and goes back to that sleeping boy. It’s strange, I often wonder what must have become of him. Memory is a perpetually pregnant woman: it always has cravings. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s that I’ve spent the last sixty years like that little boy. Sleeping on the corner of life, dreaming. That’s why I think about that little boy so much.

  Once I was back in my room I lit another cigarette. I wanted to stretch out on the bed. And who did I find? Marie Antoinette, of course, on top of the pillow and poised to urinate. I rolled up a newspaper into a paper truncheon. This time I had decided to make mashed turtle out of her.

  As she ran away she jumped from the bed to my desk, and once there she began to walk on my typewriter. A fatal course: between the keys there was enough space to trap her. I raised the rolled newspaper, preparing to beat her cruelly, when I realised that there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. By some bloody coincidence Marie Antoinette’s little feet had written: VVvveryy well. I looked at poor Marie Antoinette, stuck in the keyboard, with more compassion. It was surprising, but I couldn’t even remember how our battle had begun. Who knows? Maybe all that time we had just wanted to assert ourselves against the world, she as a turtle and me as a writer.

  Marie Antoinette had written, ‘Very well’. And she was right. What did it matter that my story was someone else’s? Surely it was of as little importance as the fact that Marie Antoinette’s shell was man-made. That didn’t make me less of a writer, just as that wooden shell didn’t make her less of a turtle.

  Instead of tanning her with the newspaper, what I did was take her to the kitchen so we could share a moment. Whisky for me and shoe polish for her.

  (You might be wondering what became of Marie Antoinette. That question is very easy to answer: she lives with me. I have shared my house with her since 1955, when Mrs MacMahon left her to me in her will. According to the vet she belongs to a race of turtles that can live up to three hundred years old, so when I’m dead she will have outlived all the characters in this story.)

  I visited Norton’s office to give him the definitive typescript. And I did it the same day that I sent a copy by certified mail to the Duke of Craver, respecting our gentlemen’s pact. Norton and I agreed that we would meet up a week later to pay off the last of my fees. I took advantage of that time to pay a visit to the Duke of Craver.

  The Duke had always had a very vague idea about how his sons had died. My sending him the typescript would force him to see Richard finished off like a beast in a bullring and William upside down with his brain devoured by African rats. I arrived at the Craver mansion with the excuse that I had gone to listen to the Duke’s objections. But what really brought me there was the need for atonement.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ the butler greeted me. ‘You should know that lately the mail has been slow and we did not receive your typescript until yesterday. The Duke has spent the day reading it.’ And he added, in a sombre tone, ‘He hasn’t come out of his office yet.’

  The butler made a couple of trips from the small waiting room where he had left me to the Duke’s chambers. Finally he returned, ashen-faced, and said, ‘The Duke will see you now.’

  Instead of announcing me, the butler left me at the entrance to the office and departed nervously. I had to push the door myself. The office was still dark, like my first visit, with large curtains sealing off the windows. The only source of light was a blue-flamed lamp that let off gas with a dense hiss.

  I was expecting the solid figure of the Duke fortified behind his large desk, poised to destroy me with his verbal artillery. Instead, I found a shrivelled man sitting in a chair, in the corner of the room. The Duke was one of those individuals that appeared to be much more strapping standing up than sitting down. Now that his bones had found a resting place, the spongy flesh expanded on both sides of his ribs. His chin touched his chest. That way he could distract himself watching the fingers of one hand play with those on the other.

  ‘I can imagine how you feel. A little bit, at least,’ I said. But the Duke didn’t answer me. He didn’t even raise his eyes from his fingers. In a very different tone of voice I said, ‘I didn’t want to turn either Richard or William, especially William, into one of the most evil characters of the twentieth century.’

  The hissing of the gas was worse than the Duke’s silence. I was grateful that my hands could keep themselves occupied holding my hat. Otherwise I don’t know what I would have done.

  ‘I am here to tell you something,’ I wen
t on. ‘A father’s criteria could never be replaced by a chronicler’s. But it would be worth your while to listen to me, I think.’

  I took a step forward, urging myself on, and, with a bit more of a decisive spirit, I said, ‘It’s quite curious, but if we analyse William as a character, objectively, we are faced with someone less guilty than the adjectives would suggest. It was even a surprise to me to discover that. In the end, William didn’t commit any crime punishable by law. His attitude towards the Africans was in keeping with the colonial system. And for that, as Europeans, we are all responsible. As far as the Tectons, who wouldn’t have shot them? So we are left with the girl and the ignominious kidnapping to which she was subjected. Kidnapping? We’ll never know what happened between William and Amgam, inside that tent. The only thing that is certain is that at the end of the story we discover that William never laid a hand on her. He was incapable of it. And we cannot hate someone because they were unable to consummate a crime.’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Sir, perhaps I’ve been too cruel with William. Perhaps what ends up condemning a man is not so much his actions as the literary style of the one who transcribes them.’

  The Duke said nothing. I wanted to respect his silence. I took two steps back without turning my back to him, like someone bidding farewell to a king. But just as I had grasped the doorknob, I heard a voice that said, ‘William became something infinitely more odious than a rapist or a murderer.’

  I stopped. Without every raising his eyes off of his fingers, the Duke added, ‘William was an obstacle to love.’

  I still waited seven days before going to see Norton again, as we had agreed. And so, after many difficult situations and many emotions, four years after our fateful meeting in the cemetery, we sat together in the same office. But with the definitive story between us.