Pandora in the Congo

  At some point on the journey Marcus changed Godefroide’s name to Pepe; it was shorter and easier to pronounce. William and Richard laughed at the joke. And Pepe stuck. That familiarity wasn’t as strange as it might seem. Because of their daily tasks, Marcus and Godefroide had a very intense relationship. Godefroide (we’ll call him Pepe from now on), was the Negro man who held the highest rank in the expedition’s hierarchy. And Marcus was the white man with the lowest. They were very close to each other. There was always some sort of invisible dividing line between them. Like two men separated by bars, each on one side. But that didn’t keep them from being the two closest men, each on their own side of the bars.

  William and Richard slept in the same tent. Pepe, at first, slept out under the stars, like the bearers. One day he had a bad toothache. Even though he had a very stoic nature, William decided that Pepe should share Marcus’s tent. He didn’t want the bearers to see any weakness in the man, who was both guide and guardian. Marcus slept in a more humble tent, along with some piled-up trunks that had to be protected from the weather. He made a spot for Pepe and when the toothache subsided, no one thought of kicking him out.

  In some corner of Marcus’s mind, solid parallels with his childhood were established. He slept with Godefroide as he had slept with Pepe the bear from his youth. In a world where men were treated like animals, it could at least be said of Marcus Garvey that he shared his life with one of those animals.

  It became necessary to replace the dead bearers. But that was easier said than done. All the towns were identical: a handful of round cabins with adobe walls and thatched roofs. And all the towns were deserted by the time the expedition reached them. There were plenty of signs that indicated the inhabitants had fled as fast as their legs could carry them. They must have had enough experience with what happened on the caravans. Later, an unforeseen crisis hovered over the Craver brothers’ expedition: the bearers had no value compared to the load they were transporting; but until they found a mine, the load was of no use to them.

  Their boldness was their main asset. At that point they had gone so far, so deep in, that their feet were treading on regions where the white man was only a rumour. People didn’t flee in fear, they approached curiously, like penguins, without suspecting the threat those white men represented. The only ones that panicked were the children. They had never seen beings so ghostly pale and they cried from fright. The cruellest thing of all was that the inhabitants of those towns laughed at the poor devils on the caravan. They tortured them in a thousand ways: dancing around the captives, rubbing their penises on their buttocks to humiliate them and piercing their cheeks and the palms of their hands with burins. It didn’t occur to them that they could be the next victims.

  William and Richard always used the same tactic. They arrived in a village and assembled everyone. Before speaking they demanded a respectable distance between them and the indigenous mass, who laughed, jumped and danced, awaiting some gift or other. Finally they would manage to get all those black bodies and all those white smiles to gather before them, neatly collected. That was when they would throw a stick of dynamite into the crowd.

  Red dirt erupted. Arms and legs flew. Shouts and moans. Pepe and Marcus would fall upon the wounded throng. Jumping with rapid movements, they chose the most stunned men, who had a hard time understanding what was going on. They shackled their necks while William and Richard beat them with the butts of their guns. In this fashion the caravan became restocked with bearers.

  I remember Marcus explaining all that to me on a day of heavy rain. The noise of the water chiming against the walls of the prison could be heard in our inner cell. Marcus raised his arms as he reproduced the dynamite’s explosion, ‘Boom!’ I involuntarily made a fist, a small nervous spasm, and my wooden pencil made a dry cracking noise. While I looked at the two pieces I said, with an iron voice, ‘And what did you do to prevent it?’

  The words were still crossing the border of my mouth when I regretted having spoken. Too late. Marcus was very surprised. I had never interrupted him when he was speaking. His magnificent green eyes blinked, like the wings of a butterfly, and he very politely asked, ‘Could you repeat the question?’

  I snorted. ‘What did you do to stop William Craver and Richard Craver from blowing up a handful of helpless men, women, old people and children with sticks of dynamite?’

  Marcus looked from one side to the other, for some assistance that wasn’t there.

  ‘Stop them?’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think you understand. I was the one who threw the dynamite.’

  I had been listening with an electrical tension in my spine. But when I heard that I felt a shot of sulphur enter my bloodstream.

  ‘After the explosion Pepe and I were very busy chaining up survivors. William and Richard shot off their guns,’ explained Marcus. ‘The shots made them more confused and upset, and kept them from resisting at all. William and Richard enjoyed it. For them, recruiting bearers was the closest thing to a sport that one could practise in the Congo. While Pepe and I rushed about tying up the captured men, the Craver brothers examined them. The explosion had torn off those tattered straw rags they wore, and Richard often laughed as he pointed between their legs with the tip of his rifle, saying, ‘Oh, oh, oh, look at that! That is something! What big cocks on these fellows!’

  Marcus Garvey stood accused of killing two men. For that he was awaiting trial. But dozens had been killed by his hand, maybe hundreds of men, women and children. And no one accused him of those crimes.

  Marcus raised his eyebrows high.

  ‘And what exactly would you have done, Mr Thomson?’

  My body recoiled, searching for the back of the chair. It had been a mistake to ask him anything. Now Marcus had every right to ask me questions. Once the question was posed, I couldn’t avoid it. My hostility towards Marcus dissipated as quickly as it had risen, replaced by immense doubt. I wasn’t at all sure where his guilt began. William and Richard had ordered him to throw the sticks of dynamite. And if he had refused? William and Richard were the heads of the expedition, and he was just a stableboy.

  When the book finally came out it was described by some as a magnificent portrait of human degradation. They were wrong. The most incomprehensible aspect of horror is that there is nothing to understand. Horror is incredibly shallow and common. One only needs two things in order to kill: the ability and the desire. William and Richard could kill and they wanted to kill. From that point on I didn’t count the number of dead. I would have loved to write the story of three healthy English youths that progressively degenerate, three youths that become more and more morally dissolute the further into the jungle they get. And yet, Marcus never mentioned any of that, not actively or passively. There was no process of conversion to barbarism. William and Richard were the same men in England as they were in the Congo. But the Congo was not England.

  Marcus was convinced, and with reason, that recruiting bearers with explosives was a regular practice in the Congo. Neither William nor Richard was breaking any law; the question was if such an disgraceful act could be morally accepted? In this case, where does the decency of a reasonably honest man begin? Would Garvey have had to refuse the food restrictions that William had demanded a few days earlier? Or perhaps, at the house in Leopoldville, he should have insisted on sharing a room with the Negro servants? We must also keep in mind that Marcus Garvey couldn’t oppose the Craver brothers’ authority lightly. For a stableboy to rebel against two aristocrats, alone and in the middle of the jungle, would have required Marcus to be endowed with some inconceivable type of heroism.

  But the core of the problem was something else. We have a tendency to think that the magnitude of pain inflicted is directly proportional to the effort required to cause it. No. The Congo had placed Marcus in an unusual position: active collaboration in evil was a matter of a concession as simple as holding out your hand. Now, a lifetime later, I have no doubt: that hand was the essence of the twentieth centur
y.

  Marcus’s question awaited reply. I rubbed my eyes with my closed fists, and I could only say, ‘I never would have gone to the Congo.’

  SIX

  LIKE COLUMBUS, WILLIAM LIED to the others about how far they had gone. And like Hannibal, he always promised them that their goal was around the next hill. Who was he trying to fool? The bearers’ opinions meant nothing to him. Marcus and Pepe were subordinate voices. And, in fact, the one who decided when and where they would stop was Richard. In the army he had served in a logistics unit; he had also studied a bit of mineralogy, and it was he who carried out the prospecting. But the diamonds never showed up.

  Richard was desperate; William, furious. Sometimes they were both desperate and furious. William screamed; Richard cried and screamed. Worst of all, they had gone so far looking for their imaginary treasures, so deep into a virgin jungle, they no longer found any towns, there were no more human beings to replace the losses. There were only trees, thorns and animal noises. But whether led by the constancy of the bold or of the demented, they continued.

  Those who create a problem are the first ones to look for the guilty party. And the loudest. William and Richard accused each other. The jungle had never heard such horrid abominations.

  Marcus realised that Pepe tended to keep his distance from the two brothers, at the tail end of the expedition. One day he too placed himself at the back.

  ‘Why do you always stay at the end, Pepe?’

  ‘William and Richard are like two elephants. One is fatter, the other has longer tusks,’ replied the Negro man. ‘And I know who loses when two elephants fight.’

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘The ants.’

  Marcus couldn’t recall the exact day when the expedition arrived at that clearing. He had lost count of the days and nights. And everyone had changed somewhat. Especially the Craver brothers. They were no longer half-penny explorers. The jungle had put them through some sort of aesthetic erosion. Their clothes, bought in London’s finest tailors, had become frayed and faded. Large rings of sweat had overtaken their armpits, chest and back. With the exception of the bottles of champagne, no other glassware had survived. And that was how the caravan arrived at the clearing – that clearing.

  Someone gave the order to halt. The bearers let themselves drop, exhausted. Marcus sat on a rock. Further on, William and Richard argued fiercely. One chased the other, who would withdraw and refuse to listen, until an insult too crude would make him attack and the other withdraw. Who would have imagined it? Two English noblemen arguing with the gestures of Italian greengrocers. Any moment they might unsheathe their revolvers and shoot each other.

  The clearing was unusually large. More or less like a rugby field. The ground was welcoming, half covered by patches of green grass and in stretches by that red African sand, finer than any tropical beach. Marcus lay flat, absorbed in looking at the sky, that sky so blue which they could only see in the few moments when they went through a clearing. He lowered his eyes. His gaze fixed, by chance, on a random blade of grass. It looked like an asparagus. Marcus wondered, ‘Is there asparagus in the Congo?’ He brought his hand closer, and below the asparagus appeared a glow, a yellow light that hurt his eyes.

  Marcus interrupted the Craver brothers’ fratricidal war. With one hand raised, he said, ‘There’s something shiny here.’

  It was like two people arguing over a stolen wallet when a third person shows up saying he found it on the ground. Marcus offered the golden grain to Richard.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ said Richard after a quick look.

  Marcus gestured vaguely and said with a certain indifference, ‘Here, in the clearing.’

  If the bearers hadn’t been half-dead with exhaustion they would have laughed. They had gone to the ends of the earth, and even further, and the white bosses spent their time pacing through the clearing like hens, their backs hunched as if they were looking for little worms to peck at.

  ‘Here!’ shouted William.

  ‘Here!’ shouted Richard.

  ‘And more here!’ said Marcus.

  And even Pepe found a golden chickpea, and he held it up with two fingers very close to his eyes, looking at it as if he were an expert watchmaker. He raised it above his head, and said, ‘A little yellow stone. They’re everywhere.’

  A few days later they had set up a permanent camp in the clearing. Since a large part of Garvey’s story took place in that extraordinary clearing, I should devote some lines to describing it.

  The clearing was shaped like an egg. In its exact centre they made a hole that grew deeper by the day: the mine itself. The Negroes got orders to dig and dig, and not to worry about anything else. And when the hole was deep enough and wide enough William freed them from their chains. The shackles were no longer needed: from that moment on they would sleep inside the mine. During the day the Negroes worked overseen by rifles, during the night the ladder – a trunk with sticks going through it like a fish bone – was taken away. The mine’s exit, way up high, was just a hole in the ceiling. No one could get out through there. It was a mine and a perfect prison.

  William and Richard, Marcus and Pepe soon began to refer to the hole that was the mine’s entrance as the ‘anthill’. Many feet stamped each day on the sides of the hole, so that the mouth of the mine took on a conical shape, like a dwarf volcano. Or a giant anthill.

  The inside was shaped like a pumpkin. The Negroes pounded at the walls and expanded the hole. As the space got wider, they placed vertical beams to prop up the ceiling. From some of the beams they hung oil lamps. They gave off a cold light that amplified the wall’s scarlet colour. Inside it was unpleasantly hot. And it smelled dirty, like burnt cheese.

  The workers were distributed into three rotating shifts. Most scraped at the walls with short sticks. There were no picks: the Negroes’ capacity for submission seemed infinite, but William and Richard didn’t trust them. The earth was porous and came away easily. Some others, not many, filled wicker baskets and had permission to carry them up to the outside, taking turns going up the ladder. And a third group, much smaller and even luckier (because they could leave the mine), removed the gold from the dirt.

  Richard had built a rudimentary bathtub at the foot of the mine with caulked wood. There they washed and separated the dirt from the gold. Not far into the surrounding jungle, there was a small stream. With trunks hollowed out by machete strikes and connected to each other, like tiles, Richard made some pipes that brought water. He had them lead to the bathtub and then return to the stream so that the clearing wouldn’t flood.

  In any case, as far as the Negroes were concerned, one would have to say that the establishment of the mine had brought them more benefits than adversity. The Cravers had gone far, incredibly far. They had gone further than the natives, to a latitude empty of men. If the Negroes died, who would replace them? So, in general terms, and even though it was only from self-interest, the treatment became more benign. The work in the mine was less punishing than hauling. And their food increased thanks to what the forest provided. Now the two brothers had much more free time, and they spent it hunting. Marcus cooked meats that were strange, yes, but nutritious.

  Fifteen days later, William drew up some careful calculations in order to establish the mine’s output. Each day of work yielded ten and twenty ounces of pure gold. That meant daily profits of around two hundred pounds sterling. Tax free, of course.

  Up until then the Cravers had exploited the Negroes’ feet as bearers. Now they exploited their hands as miners. No one bothered to count the deaths that it had cost to get there.

  There are days when, before getting out of bed, we sense, we know, that everything is going to go wrong. That was how that Sunday began. I was running late. I had to be at the barrister’s office with a copy of my progress and I was still getting dressed. I rushed to the bathroom as fast as I could and in the hallway I met up with Marie Antoinette, the turtle. I hadn’t seen her, and I almost twisted my ank
le for the umpteenth time.

  Enraged, I kicked her, making her fly like a rugby ball. It might seem like excessive treatment for a turtle without a shell. It wasn’t. In Mrs Pinkerton’s boarding house, there were only two certainties: that the landlady was already old when Tutankhamen was born and that her turtle hated me with an unfathomable passion. And that Marie Antoinette had powers, yes, that too. For example, my kick had sent her flying through the air from one end of the hallway to the other. Any other turtle would have shrunk into its shell. Not her. Since she didn’t have one she had acquired a cat’s instinct and landed on her feet.

  Marie Antoinette turned around, very worked up. She was looking for the perpetrator of that attack. She saw me, and when she had me in her line of vision she attacked me with rage. All turtles have ugly mouths but Marie Antoinette’s was particularly ugly, a real crow’s beak. She came towards me like a Roman battering ram.

  Some might think that turtles don’t do cavalry charges but if we were to look at the world from a turtle’s perspective, we would surely find that some were quick and some were slow. Well, from a turtle’s point of view, Marie Antoinette was charging.

  The hallway was narrow. If I wanted to leave the house I had to get past her. Naturally, I wasn’t going to give up an appointment with Norton just because an hysterical turtle was attacking me. I couldn’t believe it: there I was, Tommy Thomson, going face to face with a turtle as if we were two knights in a medieval joust.

  She charged towards me, and I went towards her. She had some horrific white foam coming from her mouth. We approached each other. I was above her. I thought: now I’ll step on one of her feet, and she’ll cry out, and Pinkerton will have to spend my rent money on vet’s bills. But at the last second, in an agile manoeuvre, Marie Antoinette turned and wrapped herself around my ankle. I abhor any reptilian contact and I jumped. She fled. I stumbled. I staggered. I fell!