Pandora in the Congo
As I headed home I couldn’t get the image of Marcus and Amgam setting off for some remote country out of my head. A lifelong honeymoon awaited them. I thought of a story in which the protagonist was the mysterious Mrs Garvey. On the voyage she never comes out of their cabin and ends up arousing the suspicions of the other passengers, who insist on knowing who is hiding in there.
Unfortunately, Poe had already written a story that was very similar, I discovered later. I would never been able to convince the critics that my story wasn’t plagiarised. In fact, the two stories were completely antithetical. In Poe’s story the husband is transporting the body of his dead wife: death. In mine, Garvey is travelling with Amgam: life. When the passengers burst into the cabin of the man transporting a body, they are horrified. When they burst in on Marcus, they discover a woman born under a stone sky. But Amgam is Amgam. And the crowd, instead of lynching her, transform into more worthy, more tolerant, better people. Well, it doesn’t matter. No one would have believed that it was an original idea and I ended up tossing it in the bin. But my story was better than Poe’s. I wanted to at least mention that here.
TWENTY-NINE
ONCE, DURING ONE OF our sessions, Marcus told me about a scientific argument the Craver brothers had had. It happened during one of the more uneventful periods in the clearing, before the Tectons came. I don’t remember the exact terms of the debate. I think it had something to do with the rotation of the planet. According to Richard, a marksman that shoots a bullet vertically into the air will never run the risk of being wounded by that bullet. In the brief lapse that the projectile would take to ascend and descend, the earth would have moved, and the projectile would fall at a certain angle with respect to the gun’s barrel. To prove his point, Richard ended up shooting into the sky, in the position of someone starting a sprint.
That bullet went up, very high up. That solitary bullet went even further up than Marcus and Amgam when they climbed up into the great tree of their love. At some point the force of the ascent and the force of gravity must have equalised. In that precise moment, if the bullet had had eyes, it would have seen the Congo with more perspective than any of the characters involved in the drama in the clearing. Its fall would have also been more painful: he who has seen more loses more, and the more astounding the thing he’s seen, the harder it is to give it up.
In a way I was that bullet. My instant of balance between the force of ascent and descent was right there at the courtroom exit. Like that bullet, I couldn’t fall in the exact place I had come from, but the fall would leave me wounded.
In any case, in the days following the verdict, the only thing I thought about was setting my life on some constructive path. Thanks to that chain of events, the editor of the Times of Britain had promoted me. My new position wasn’t up to much, but I let myself get absorbed in my work, devoting myself to it with the un restrained energy of someone who had been promoted prematurely. The first problem that I had to face had a proper name: Hardlington.
The years have only confirmed for me an idea that the Hardlington case brought to light: that odious situations are more common than odious men, and that being around humiliated people ends up humiliating us. Once the hierarchical relationship between Hardlington and me was reversed, he went from being a despot to being a ghost. I couldn’t take his perpetually contrite face, I found it morally intolerable, so one day I decided to deal with the situation. I could have called him into my office, but I chose to approach his desk, so that everyone could witness it.
‘Mr Hardlington,’ I said, ‘I think we should have a brief conversation on the fundamental literary principles.’
When every typewriter in the room had stopped, I continued, ‘I have read your complete works.’ It was a lie, of course, but it sounded really good. ‘And I think that you are making one mistake, only one but it is a decisive one. You are a great reader of the classics, but only of the classics. Think about this, none of the authors who have become classics wanted to be like the classic authors read in their day. They admired them, yes, but they didn’t imitate them. On the other hand, Mr Hardlington, it is obvious that the greats cannot compare themselves to one another. To truly measure the value of a good author, what we need to do is compare him to bad authors.’
I held up a book with both hands; I extended my arms towards Hardlington as if I was making him an offering. It was an old one of mine and the worst of them all: Pandora in the Congo, the first assignment from Doctor Luther Flag.
‘I am of the opinion, Mr Hardlington, that a good author has to follow his own path, far from the one forged by the classics. An author should never focus on the books he wants to imitate, but rather on the ones he doesn’t want his to be like.’
And I finished by saying, ‘The way I see it, Mr Hardlington, a good writer should only have one goal in his life as a narrator, only one: to never write this book.’
Things got better. Since I had written Pandora in the Congo, and I had publicly given Hardlington permission to criticise me, his humiliation was mitigated. He even regained some of his old petulance. But since he no longer had any power it wasn’t hateful, just quaint, and our day-today relations improved immeasurably.
And that’s how it was for a few more days. My increased salary allowed me the luxury of making plans for a future beyond the boarding house. I didn’t know how to thank the MacMahons for their hospitality. Meanwhile Mr MacMahon took up reading the story of Garvey. He had never read a book, so I considered it an honour. Would he read it from start to finish or would he end up using it to steady the kitchen table?
My answer came soon. Two nights later MacMahon had reached the climax. I was asleep when I felt a hand shaking my shoulders.
‘Tommy, Tommy! Wake up, son!’
I jumped, convinced that we were being bombed again, but before I could get out of bed MacMahon asked me, ‘Who are these people?’
‘What people? What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘The Tectons! What will we do if they decide to invade us? The Tectons are worse than the war, Tommy!’
The way he said it, it sounded like he had a Tecton under his bed.
‘Mr MacMahon,’ I informed him, rubbing my eyes, ‘a book isn’t finished until the last page.’
And I must say that when MacMahon had finished reading the book, he was more pleased than I was when I finished writing it. It was a Sunday morning.
‘I finished a book! I finished a book!’ he said, brandishing the copy like a trophy.
He was bounding about the dining room and his tribe of children danced around him delightedly without quite understanding why.
That same day, after lunch, we were still at the table when MacMahon said to me, ‘Can I ask you a question about the book, Tommy? I’m very curious.’
‘Ask away, Mr MacMahon,’ I said.
He brought his head close to mine and asked me in a confidential tone, ‘Remember the chapter where Garvey and Amgam are up in a tree?’ He lowered his voice with a complicit smile on his lips, ‘You know, when they’re up in that giant tree touching each other and doing dirty stuff.’
‘I remember perfectly, Mr MacMahon,’ I informed him. ‘I wrote the book.’
‘Where was their toilet?’ MacMahon asked me.
After a pause, I said disappointedly: ‘This is your big question?’
‘Well, I have a lot more, but that one’s important, don’t you think? Look, Tommy, I’ve made some calculations.’ He showed me a sheet of paper filled with simple arithmetic. ‘I multiplied the approximate daily amount of human excrement produced by two people over seven days, the approximate period that according to the book Garvey and Amgam were up in the tree together. And I got a lot! The question is: how could they stand the smell? If the tree were that big and dense, it would have landed in the branches below them. The heat must have made a horrible stench! How could they stand it?’
‘I don’t know!’ I protested. ‘The Congo is an immense humid place, the rains are torrential. May
be they washed away all the filth!’
‘No, no, no,’ insisted Mr MacMahon with the perseverance of a termite. ‘I consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and when Marcus was in the forests of the Congo it was the dry season. It didn’t rain or hardly at all! And it was frightfully hot! All that shite must have got in the way of any amorous stuff!’
I became a little annoyed. ‘Please, Mr MacMahon! What do we stand to gain by destroying such a lovely scene?’
Mr MacMahon gave in. Or to put it a better way, he let it go. Since he looked disappointed, I suggested that he ask me some more questions. Maybe my answers would satisfy him more and that would put an end to the debate. Here MacMahon exposed an incredible quantity of formal defects. For example: on such and such a page Richard complained that he had no more tobacco, and then later on he smoked a cigar. Things like that.
‘Yes, I know,’ I said in my defence. ‘Marcus’s experiences in the Congo caused him to have an emotional collapse. I think that we have to be a bit indulgent with the minor details of the story. Anyone who had been fighting for his life, for his beloved and for the freedom of all humanity, would have been unable to retain such insignificant minutiae as the ones you are mentioning.’
I convinced MacMahon. But I hadn’t convinced myself. I began to feel as if I was being interrogated by a prosecutor, a prosecutor a thousand times more sharp than the one Norton had had to go up against. MacMahon turned a few pages. Then he filled his lungs, large as barrels, with a whale’s sigh, and he said to me with genuine candour, ‘Tommy, why didn’t the Negroes just run away? Do you understand it?’
‘But, Mr MacMahon!’ I put forward with a triumphant smile. ‘They were shackled at the neck with iron stocks. Don’t you remember?’
‘No, no,’ he corrected me. ‘I’m talking about in the second phase, when they were turned into miners.’
That worried me. I was afraid that my description of the mine hadn’t been clear enough. I explained to MacMahon that the inside of the mine was a spherical space with a hole above that was the only exit.
‘Imagine some sort of skylight,’ I said pointing to the centre of the ceiling with my finger. ‘As much as we might try to scale the walls it would be impossible for us to get to the top, because we would have nothing to grab on to.’
‘That’s perfectly clear,’ said MacMahon, ‘but in the book it says that at night no one watched over that exit, or the anthill.’
‘That’s right. It wasn’t necessary. It was enough to just take away the ladder. A solution as simple as it is ingenious! Don’t you think?’
But MacMahon flipped through the book and shook his head. Finally he said, ‘No.’
‘No?’ I said.
‘No,’ he insisted.
He continued flipping through the book with a grimace, as if it were the book and not me that had to resolve his questions. Finally he raised his head, looked at me with his little pug dog eyes and said, ‘Look, Tommy, how hard would it be for those boys to climb up on each other? With a simple human tower they would have managed to get to the anthill. Don’t you think?’
I didn’t know what to say. All of a sudden I found myself making a gesture I knew all too well: I looked from one side of the table to the other. And I wasn’t making that gesture because I was actually hesitating over something, but because I needed to buy time while I made up something to get out of the situation. I sensed some sort of indecent horror floating in the air.
‘You know why that didn’t occur to the two brothers?’ And he himself replied, ‘Because they were English. I know because I’m Irish. The English think that they rule Ireland because they are cleverer than the Irish. It’s not true. They rule only because they are stronger. That’s why they didn’t think that a handful of Negroes could conceive of such a simple escape plan. Because they thought that the Negroes were idiots. But they weren’t idiots. Just slaves.’
MacMahon went back to examining the book, looking at it against the light as if he was going to find the solution somewhere, written in invisible ink. And he concluded, without looking at me, ‘But why didn’t the Negroes escape from the mine?’
I had no answer. In fact, I didn’t have an answer to any of the questions that MacMahon had asked me that morning.
‘Well,’ I said, my mouth dry as I swallowed saliva, ‘I am English too, Mr MacMahon, and I don’t have anything against the intelligence of the Irish. Or the African’s.’
‘Oh, of course not, Tommy!’ apologised MacMahon. ‘You can be English and a good person! I’m only saying that the English, the good and the bad, think like the English. They never think like the oppressed because they’ve never suffered the oppression they impose on others.’
MacMahon turned a couple of pages and it was if a little light suddenly switched on. He looked at me with his eyes opened very wide and said, ‘Now that I think about it, you interviewed Marcus Garvey.’
‘Yes. Many times.’
‘Then you, a good English person with great consideration for the African intelligence, surely must have asked him that question many times. What did Mr Garvey say about that?’
I couldn’t stand being compared to the Craver brothers. Or maybe what I couldn’t stand was not having the answers to such simple questions. Or the fact that I’d never thought to ask Marcus Garvey such an obvious question. I left the boarding house with the excuse of taking a walk, furious, after replying curtly and rudely. Poor Mr MacMahon. He still resents me for that.
I took a walk through the neighbourhood, smoking constantly. I was so upset that I lit one cigarette with the butt of the previous one. I wanted to get MacMahon’s question out of my head but I couldn’t. Why hadn’t the Negroes escaped from the mine?
Before going back home I couldn’t help stopping in front of the old boarding house, still in ruins. The building looked like a poorly made cake, and I could still make out the window of my room, now a rhombus. I was thinking about insignificant things when I felt a finger tapping on my right shoulder.
‘Excuse me, is your name Thomson? Thomas Thomson?’
It was the local postman, accompanied by his pouch, his peaked cap and his inseparable bicycle. I confirmed his suspicion, and the man explained himself with a wide smile.
‘I remember you very well, yes. You were the young man that cursed the Kaiser the day the zeppelins bombed that building.’ He pointed to the boarding house in ruins. ‘I arrived right at that moment to give you a notice. You were really angry! It’s hard to forget such a young man.’
‘Well, yes, it was me,’ I remembered, smiling back at him.
Seen with the distance of survivors, the anecdote became funnier than it had been before.
‘Pardon the interruption,’ continued the postman, ‘but shortly after I had to deliver another letter that was also addressed to you, Mr Thomas Thomson. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what to do with it. They had evacuated the building and I had no idea where you’d been posted. I thought to myself that such an outspoken and decisive boy as yourself, if he ever found out that someone had written him a letter, he might come to look for it. Some day.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Thank you for your concern. But I have no family and few friends,’ I said, ‘so I doubt it was important.’
‘It was,’ insisted the postman. ‘It came from a prison and the sender was awaiting execution. I know because it was a very famous name.’
The man got back on his bicycle. As he headed off down the street, he said, ‘Well, as you wish. If you are interested, the letter is still waiting at the main post office. Do you know what? There are letters that have waited entire decades to arrive in the right hands.’
Why had I happened upon that kindly postman? When the German bomb destroyed the book it was inevitable that someone like Tommy Thomson would rage in the middle of the street. And my display had made the postman remember me, which made it practically inevitable that soon or later I would meet up with him again.
Why had that
German zeppelin bombed us? Because we were at war with Germany. And why were we at war with Germany? For the colonies. Why the colonies? Because the colonies made countries and men rich. That’s why the Craver brothers had gone there: to get rich. And if they hadn’t gone I would never have written anything. It’s all very simple and at the same time it’s all very complicated.
From the postman’s description I assumed he was talking about a letter from Marcus. ‘Perhaps,’ I said to myself, ‘Marcus wrote me something after I went into the ranks.’ I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to him then.
I was wrong. The letter wasn’t from Garvey. It was from Casement.
Casement couldn’t have known that as he wrote me those lines I was sheathed in the uniform that he had fought so hard against and that, as a result, the letter would be stored away for two years. Remember that the letter made it to my hands in the autumn of 1918, and that Casement had been executed in 1916, when I was at the front. My God, that letter! I didn’t open it in the post office. I remember that I went back to the boarding house, headed to the dining room and sat in an armchair with its back to the window. In the armchair facing mine sat Modepà, as usual. He was flipping through the latest issue of the Times of Britain, to which we had a free subscription thanks to my job.
No other letter, or anything else I have ever read, has moved me so much. Sixty years have passed and I can still recite it from memory.
This is what it said:
Dear Mr Thomas Thomson,
When you read these lines my body will have already served to stop twenty-four bullets. So I have little time left, and I don’t want to waste it on laments. During the short time you and I spent together you seemed to be a young man whose virtue stood out above all the others: a love for the truth shone inside you. In any case these lines are not meant to convince Mr Thomson to try to change the sentence that weighs on me – an impossible task – but that of another legal case in which we have common interests.
The Garvey case, which began before mine, will also end later. Remember that I was one of the instigators for the collection of signatures within the European community in Leopoldville. All those good citizens, Belgians and British, signed a document remarking on Marcus Garvey’s criminal nature. I know what you are thinking: that Garvey’s defence will have a very easy time, now, destroying my credibility. It makes no difference. If my calculations are correct, Marcus will not escape justice that easily.