I never thought I would see Norton excited, just as one doesn’t expect to see a stone dancing. This time he didn’t make that gesture so characteristic of him, ruminating with a pyramid of fingers touching his nose.
‘It is a great book,’ he began, tapping two fingers on top of the pack of bound pages, ‘a fine book, Tommy. For its style, its plot, its characters. But above all for its perspective. You were able to find the core of the truth in that story, which was so difficult and twisted, so confused.’
He stopped. He lifted his eyes from the table, and his gaze paid me homage. He said, ‘Some day, at some point in the future, critics will say of the authors that are now the stars in the British literary heavens: he was a contemporary of Thomas Thomson. And that’s all they’ll say.’ He sat up straighter and concluded, ‘You will make a career for yourself, I’m sure of it.’
Should I be apologetic when admitting that Norton’s praise flattered my vanity?
‘We will save Marcus from the pyre, won’t we?’ I asked, trying to create a distance between Norton’s approbation and my work.
Norton said, ‘With the blind help of justice, we shall.’
It was more of a slogan than a conviction. But that was where our meeting concluded. He had nothing more to say to me. He paid me, in cash, the fees he still owed me, and I put them in my pocket. I had done the job that Norton had assigned me, he had paid me what he owed me. We were even. Norton didn’t ask questions or expect me to ask any of him. He remained stock-still. He didn’t even blink. It was one way of telling me that he and I had finished. All of a sudden I felt uncomfortable, although I didn’t know exactly why. But everything was as it should be. I left, of course. What could I do?
Once I was on the street, I was overtaken by a vague premonition that something wasn’t right. I believe I was suffering from the symptoms of overwork. I had a hard time believing that it was all over, at least as far as I was concerned. I had been too involved in the Garvey case to purge it so quickly, so antiseptically. But that’s how Norton was. And our relationship had always been defined by strictly professional parameters.
That day in the autumn of 1918, all of a sudden, I found myself on the street with my hands empty. I felt as if the prisoner we had been trying to get out of the cage was me, and not Marcus. I had been released with a small amount of money in my pocket and, just like a real inmate, I had little idea of what to do with my life. The book had absorbed me to such an extent that while I was writing it my future seemed to hold no importance.
As always, Mr MacMahon’s help arrived before I even knew I needed it. A few days later he shouted to me, ‘Tommy, lad! In the window of the Times of Britain there’s an advert for a journalist’s apprentice. Since you write those books I thought you might be interested.’
The Times of Britain was a small, sensationalistic weekly that eventually disappeared in the 1950s. I went there and they gave me an appointment for a test. A test of what? A writing test. I had to write a text of eighty lines on one theme. I could choose between ‘The Epic Story of Aerial Machine-guns’ and ‘A Criticism of Darwin’s Theories from a Christian Perspective’. At that point we were all sick of the war and I picked Darwin. I had only agreed to the test to make Mr MacMahon happy. Be that as it may, a few days later they had me enter the editor’s office.
‘Close the door, please,’ he said to me.
Of that man I remember, above all, that he had lips that looked like red octopus flesh, specially designed to suck on cigars. And that he was an individual with very widely spaced eyes, enormous, fat and slow moving, like a toad without legs. It seemed as if they had used a crane to install him in his armchair and that he hadn’t left it since.
‘I found your essay against Darwin very original,’ he began when I had sat down before him. ‘It never would have occurred to me to have the narrative voice be that of a turtle without a shell. And it was right! If turtles are freer and happier without a shell, why the hell should they have to have them? That contradicts all of Darwin’s principles.’
He leaned towards me.
‘You are very young. How can the Times of Britain know if you’ve got what it takes to be a journalist?’
I shrugged my shoulders. Actually, I was more curious than he was to find out. The man had very thick fingers and held a cigar so long that it looked like a cane that expelled smoke from one end. He used the Havana as a pointer to show me the door that I had just closed.
‘Try to make that door into a news headline.’
I turned my neck, following the direction that the cigar indicated. I turned back to my original position and said, ‘The editor of the Times of Britain’s door is always open.’
I made him laugh and he hired me.
So the big change of those days was my work situation. I had finished the book and I had a new job. But that didn’t help me get Amgam out of my mind.
I spent hours and hours thinking about her, as ridiculous as it was. I imagined us strolling together under the same umbrella. That we lived together and argued over trivial things. I experienced these fantasies in an intense, childish way. I could almost hear the banal reasons for a dispute, each of our arguments and counter-arguments, our making up. When I daydreamed that way, recreating time and again each and every one of the details of these fictions, I achieved some sort of pleasurable pain that is impossible to describe. Finally I would say to myself, ‘Wake up, you’ll never even see her face.’
Then, sadness.
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN I SAID THAT the Times of Britain was a sensationalistic weekly I was being very kind. According to today’s standards it would be considered an authentic factory of the imagination. If, for example, a telegram arrived stating that there had been an overflowing of the Buenos Aires estuary, the headline became ‘SERIOUS FLOODS SINK A THIRD OF THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC’. If some Chinese bandits attacked a passenger train on the outskirts of Shanghai, the Times of Britain’s headline was ‘YELLOW PERIL AT THE GATES OF EUROPE’. And if the eastern edge of the Crimean peninsula was suffering some flu strain, the news was, ‘THE BOLSHEVIKS SPREAD AN ASIAN DISEASE THAT THREATENS THE HUMAN RACE WITH EXTINCTION’. It was the spirit of the times. The Times of Britain was not much different than other weeklies. Its strength lay in the photographs, engravings and tinted drawings, and the text was only expected to accompany the graphic display.
They assigned me some simple little tasks. As an aspiring staff writer I was not allowed to participate in the elaboration of copy, strictly speaking. I was an apprentice and I stuck to minor duties, like captions for the images. There was a printing requirement that stipulated the captions had to have an exact number of letters. There couldn’t be one extra letter or one less, and that included the spaces between the words. Since then I have a gained a lot of respect for those invisible jobs, real literary sub-genres that are never recognised. And it wasn’t easy at all!
I remember once, when I was sleepy, I accidentally switched an exclamation mark and the following capital letter. It was only an exclamation mark and a capital letter, but it had disastrous results. We were living in the culminating moments of the big German offensive of 1918. On the cover of the weekly there was an illustration of Paris being bombarded by the giant German Bertha cannons. In those days there was a controversy over whether it was a good idea to defend Paris. Some, the ‘heroics’, claimed that we had to defend the city to our last drop of blood. Others, the ‘realists’, believed that it was better to establish the defences in a more solid position, to the south, before counter-attacking. Naturally, those in favour of the defence at all costs accused the ‘realists’ of being defeatists.
All in all, it was just a polemic between café strategists, but it sold a lot of papers. The editors decided to align themselves with the ‘heroics’, of course. But instead of:
PARIS! NEVER ACCEPT DEFEAT!
I turned it into:
PARIS NEVER! ACCEPT DEFEAT!
It was a good excuse for Mr Hardl
ington to scream at me for the umpteenth time.
Mr Hardlington was my boss at the Times of Britain. For some reason I never worked out, he saw in me a human representation of all the defects of the journalistic profession. He was one of those people that need to show off their power, and since I was his only direct subordinate, my lot was doubled. Hardlington’s image was extraordinarily reminiscent of that of the classic stylists, but with a more elaborate beard, groomed with a parting in the middle. He wore a monocle, those ridiculous artefacts which have thankfully fallen into disuse. In that period I knew a lot of people who wore monocles, and I have to say that all of them were rude and pedantic. Hardlington’s eyes had that ill-directed fanaticism that usually exasperates anyone who speaks with them and consumes the prophet himself. He was a big fan of Zola. But comparing Hardlington with Zola would be like comparing a worm from an apple with an anaconda from Brazil.
All the English publishing houses, without exception, had rejected his novels. Often with verbal violence, because his unhealthy insistence tired the patience of even the most polite commissioning editors. But Hardlington, as is often the case with a certain type of failure, had only one talent: perseverance. And that he had in spades: he bombarded publishers in the United States, Canada, Australia and even New Zealand with his typescripts. As incredible as it may seem, some of these houses were so good as to return the originals to him with an attached note where they apologised for not being able to place him among the most powerful minds of world literature.
It was easy to guess when he had had a typescript returned by the expression on his face when he came through the door of the Times of Britain first thing in the morning. Imagine a man who looks up at the sky hoping it will be sunny and, just at that moment, gets slammed in the face by a meteorite the size of a tram. The whole staff knew that expression, and each passing staff writer would goad him.
‘Dear Mr Hardlington, we are eager to read your work. Are your publishing contacts going as well as we all hope?’
His response was usually, ‘You all live in the primordial muck of ignorance, but I have irrefutable proof that the Semitic tentacles have reached New Zealand.’
Or Tasmania, or Nigeria, or wherever he had sent his last book. It was great fun to see Mr Hardlington among the desks of the Times of Britain, piercing the air with his umbrella as if he were brandishing a rapier. What was the direct cause of his failures? A Jewish conspiracy, dead set on silencing human genius wherever it might manifest itself. He had an incredible ability to deflect his miseries onto a higher cause, as superior as it was intangible. The more the publishers ignored him, the more convinced he was that he was the victim of an intellectual plot. According to Hardlington, the German military staff was entirely made up of Jewish generals. All the rebellions against the empire, including the revolt of the Mahdists in Sudan, the Boer insurrection and the recent Irish uprising had been incited by Jews. The Jews were directly responsible for the winters being too cold and the summers too sticky, for the droughts and for the hail. They had invented syphilis, malaria, typhus, lice and plantar warts.
But while he was sometimes amusing, having him on my back all the time was real piece of bad luck. He was endowed with a very impertinent and unpleasant voice. Imagine someone that speaks as if they had their mouth full of broken glass. And now imagine that voice becoming the lord and master of your days.
Perhaps, one day, Tommy Thomson would be a journalist. But for the moment Tommy Thomson was nothing more than a receptacle for Mr Hardlington’s frustrations. It would have made anyone depressed. In the mornings, when the Royal Steel whistle woke me up, the first thought that came into my head was of Hardlington, and all of a sudden the sheets became impregnated with synthetic glue.
I think that Hardlington, who was essentially rather insignificant, wasn’t the real cause of my bitterness. More likely, I think that Hardlington was just sanding down my imperfections. Before the book I had been under Flag’s orders. And now I was once again under the authority of another Flag. A miniature Flag, perhaps, but he closed the parenthesis of creative euphoria that writing the book had been for me.
I thought about Amgam, of course. More than ever. But without any real hope. What would I have done otherwise? Go to the Congo to look for her? Dig a deeper, larger hole than the one that day on the battlefield? No. I had accepted that love was a sad, desperate and cruel experience. My version of love was mist beneath the stones, and nothing more.
That’s how sad and resigned my thoughts were when I finished the first month of my new job at the Times of Britain. They paid me my salary, my first salary, and it was some sort of balm.
Walking around with my pockets full! What a curious and pleasurable novelty! The summer had passed, but the weather still blessed us with some sunny mornings that were as cheerful as the war allowed. I headed to a bookshop. I wanted to buy a few books without thinking about the price. Before, when I was dependent on the ill-timed and poorly paid jobs from Doctor Flag, I always had to weigh up the purchase and ask myself: it is really worth the asking price? Does it offer me enough prospects to risk the fabulous sum it costs? And here I have to say that poverty is the keenest critic. But on that occasion, for once, I planned to buy myself all the books I wanted.
The bookshop I went to had always been my favourite. The walls were covered with book spines. Completely covered. Since the ceiling was very high, to get to the ones furthest up you needed a twenty-rung ladder. If I were a book, I would have liked to be displayed in that shop. You could almost hear the books talking amongst themselves.
I was thinking that and connecting it to the way Marcus felt about trees. Perhaps that was why I had emphasised Marcus’s love for trees so much? It didn’t matter. This was a real forest of a bookshop. The owner was up at the top of a ladder, working on a remote shelf. I made my presence known, saying, ‘What do you recommend, sir?’
He was a man with saintly white hair who was a bit deaf. With one hand he cupped his ear and said, ‘What’s that you say, young man?’
I had to make a trumpet with both of my hands, and shout.
‘What new book do you recommend?’
‘Oh, yes! I agree!’ was his response. And he continued with his job as a tree-dwelling intellectual. Since there was no point in trying to make myself understood, I ran my eyes along the books on display. I looked at one table, and another, and on the third there was a book that seemed to greet me. I had the sensation that all the blood circulating throughout my body had stopped and a second later reinitiated its course in the opposite direction.
On the book’s cover there was a drawing of a couple; they held hands and ran desperately, through a jungle represented in black and white. He was a small man with olive-coloured skin. The illustrator hadn’t shown the physical defects in Marcus’s legs. She was much taller than Marcus, white, with pigtails. Marcus and Amgam were naked, but a strategically placed play of shadows and vegetation allowed the scene to respect the prevailing standards of decency. She was pretty. Stupidly pretty. A tender, weak damsel. The illustrator hadn’t understood anything.
On the back cover the story was described as ‘The extraordinary adventure of a young Englishman who faces the harshness of the tropics, the insanity of two corrupt brothers and the assault of an underground civilisation’. Norton had managed to get it published in a good house. Maybe not the best, but certainly not the worst.
I don’t know how long I stood there with the book in my hands. My knees had become ice cubes. If I stayed standing up too long they would melt and I’d fall. Finally I heard a voice saying, ‘It’s an unusual book, don’t you think?’
It was the bookseller, who had come down from the ladder. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say a word.
‘My friend!’ laughed the bookseller, very amused. ‘Are you all right? You’re whiter than the girl on the cover!’
He came a bit closer and in a resigned and confidential tone of voice he said to me, ‘I’ve always thought that the
real danger would come from Mars. We were wrong, how do you like that? The great terror isn’t beyond the stars, it’s below our feet. And meanwhile we’re wasting time fighting against these German cabbage heads!’
I then did the oddest thing: I bought my own book. The most distressing aspect of the situation was that I couldn’t complain about any of it. No one had done me any wrong. Norton had paid me religiously. What he did with the book later wasn’t any of my business.
I reread my own story with the most conflicting feelings. From what I could tell, Norton hadn’t changed a comma. He did, however, add a prologue. In it he explained that it was a real case, but that out of respect for the protagonists the real names had been suppressed. I presumed that his intention wasn’t to hide the real identities, but just to get around the law if the Duke of Craver sued him. Marcus Garvey was referred to as Rufus Garvey, and William and Richard’s surname was just never mentioned. (Although, he did state clearly that they were descendants of a ‘distinguished gentleman that had taken an active part in the Sudanese campaign and its tragic ending’.) In its day the murder of the Craver brothers had received a lot of attention. Now everyone would associate the Garvey case with the book. As you already know, the story exonerates Marcus of any crime. It goes further: it elevates him to the category of hero. That could be beneficial for Marcus’s interests. But Norton’s sophistry seemed ignoble. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to see him to argue about it. Knowing his rhetorical skills, he was capable of convincing me that England was allied with Germany and at war with France. Instead I decided to visit Marcus. It had been too long since I’d seen him. And it was even possible, I suspected, that he wasn’t aware of the book’s existence.