The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (34 page)

Africa, that horrible but beautiful continent with its enormous suffering, was also the land of freedom, where human beings could be mistreated in the most iniquitous way but, at the same time, show their passions, fantasies, desires, instincts, and dreams without the restraints and prejudices that stifled pleasure in Great Britain. He remembered an afternoon of smothering heat and high sun in Boma, when it wasn’t even a village but a tiny settlement. Suffocating and feeling that his body was on fire, he had gone to swim in the stream on the outskirts that, shortly before rushing into the waters of the Congo River, formed small lagoons and murmuring falls among the rocks in a spot with very tall mango trees, coconut palms, baobabs, and giant ferns. Two young Bakongos were swimming there, naked as he was. Though they didn’t speak English, they answered his greeting with smiles. They seemed to be swimming, but Roger soon realized they were fishing with their bare hands. Their excitement and laughter were due to the difficulty they had holding on to the slippery little fish that escaped between their fingers. One of the two boys was very beautiful. He had a long, blue-black, well-proportioned body, deep eyes with a lively light in them, and he moved in the water like a fish. With his movements, the muscles in his arms, back and thighs became prominent, gleaming with the drops of water clinging to his skin. On his dark face, with its geometric tattoos and flashing glances, his very white teeth stood out. When they finally caught a fish, with a great clamor, the other boy left the stream and went to the bank, where, it seemed to Roger, he began to cut and clean the fish and prepare a fire. The one who had stayed in the water looked into his eyes and smiled. Roger, feeling a kind of fever, swam toward him, smiling as well. When he reached his side, he didn’t know what to do. He felt shame, discomfort, and at the same time, unlimited joy.

“Too bad you don’t understand me,” he heard himself say softly. “I would have liked to take photographs of you. Talk with you. Become your friend.”

And then he felt the boy impelling himself forward with his feet and arms, shortening the distance that separated them. Now he was so close they were almost touching. And then Roger felt someone else’s hands searching out his belly, touching and caressing his sex, which had been erect for a while. In the darkness of his cell, he sighed with desire and anguish. Closing his eyes, he tried to revive that scene from so many years ago: the surprise, the indescribable excitement that nonetheless did not attenuate his misgivings and fear, and his body embracing the boy’s, whose stiff penis he could also feel rubbing against his legs and belly.

It was the first time Roger made love, if you can call it making love when he became excited and ejaculated in the water against the body of the boy who masturbated him and undoubtedly also ejaculated, though Roger didn’t notice that. When he came out of the water and dressed, the two Bakongos invited him to a few mouthfuls of the fish they had smoked over a small fire on the edge of the pool the stream had formed.

What shame he felt afterward. All the rest of the day he was in a daze, sunk in remorse that mixed with sparks of joy, the awareness of having gone past the limits of a prison and achieving a freedom he had always desired in secret and never dared look for. Was he remorseful, did he intend to make amends? Yes, yes. He did. He promised himself, for the sake of his honor, the memory of his mother, his religion, that it would not be repeated, knowing very well he was lying to himself, and now that he had tasted the forbidden fruit, felt how his entire being was transformed into a dizzying blazing torch, he could not avoid its being repeated. That was the only, or, in any case, one of the few times in which pleasure had not cost him money. Had the fact of paying his lovers of a few minutes or hours freed him very quickly from the pangs of conscience that at first hounded him after those adventures? Perhaps. As if, being converted into a commercial transaction—you give me your mouth and penis and I give you my tongue, my asshole, and several pounds—those rapid encounters in parks, dark corners, public bathrooms, stations, foul hotels, or in the middle of the street—
like dogs
, he thought—with men with whom he often could communicate only by gestures and looks because they did not speak his language, stripped those acts of all moral significance and turned them into a pure exchange, as neutral as buying ice cream or a pack of cigarettes. It was pleasure, not love. He had learned to enjoy but not to love or be loved. Occasionally in Africa, Brazil, Iquitos, London, Belfast, or Dublin, after a particularly intense encounter, some feeling had been added to the adventure and he had told himself:
I’m in love
. False: he never was. That didn’t last. Not even with Eivind Adler Christensen, for whom he had developed affection, but not that of a lover, perhaps an older brother or father. Miserable wretch. In this area, too, his life had been a complete failure. Many lovers for a price—dozens, perhaps hundreds—and not a single loving relationship. Pure sex, hurried and animal.

For that reason, when he made a reckoning of his sexual and emotional life, Roger told himself it had been belated and austere, made up of sporadic, always hasty adventures, as transient, as lacking in consequences, as the one in the stream with waterfalls and pools in the outskirts of what was still an encampment half lost in a place on the Lower Congo called Boma.

He was seized by the profound sadness that had almost always followed his furtive amorous encounters, generally outdoors, like the first one, with men and boys who were often foreigners whose names he did not know or forgot as soon as he learned them. They were ephemeral moments of pleasure, nothing that could compare with the stable relationship, lasting over months and years, in which added to passion were understanding, complicity, friendship, dialogue, solidarity, the relationship between Herbert and Sarita Ward that he had always envied. It was another of the great voids, the great nostalgias, of his life.

He saw that there where the jamb of his cell door was supposed to be, a ray of light had appeared.

XII

I’ll leave my bones on that damn trip
, Roger thought when Chancellor Sir Edward Grey told him that in view of the contradictory news coming from Peru, the only way for the British government to know what it could believe with regard to what was occurring there was for Casement to go back to Iquitos and see on the ground whether the Peruvian government had done anything to end the iniquities in Putumayo or was using delaying tactics because it would not, or could not, confront Julio C. Arana.

Roger’s health was going from bad to worse. Since his return from Iquitos, even during the few days at the end of the year that he spent in Paris with the Wards, he was again tormented by conjunctivitis and a return of malaria. And he was bothered again by hemorrhoids, though without the hemorrhages he’d had earlier. As soon as he returned to London, early in January 1911, he went to see doctors. The two specialists he consulted decided his condition was the result of the immense fatigue and nervous tension of his time in Amazonia. He needed rest, a very quiet vacation.

But he couldn’t take one. Writing the report that the British government urgently required, and many meetings at the ministry when he had to inform them of what he had seen and heard in Amazonia, as well as visits to the Anti-Slavery Society, took up a great deal of time. He also had to meet with the British and Peruvian directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company, who, during their first interview, after listening to his impressions of Putumayo for almost two hours, were left paralyzed. Their long faces, with partially opened mouths, looked at him in disbelief and horror, as if the floor had begun to open under their feet and the ceiling to fall in on their heads. They didn’t know what to say. They took their leave without formulating a single question for him.

Julio C. Arana attended the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company. It was the first and last time Roger saw him in person. He had heard so much about him, heard so many different people deify him as they tend to do with religious saints or political leaders (never with businessmen) or attribute horrendous cruelties and crimes to him—monumental cynicism, sadism, greed, avarice, disloyalty, swindles, and all kinds of knavery—that he sat observing him for a long while, like an entomologist with a mysterious insect that has not yet been classified.

It was said he understood English but never spoke it because of timidity or vanity. He had an interpreter beside him who translated everything into his ear in a very quiet voice. He was a fairly short man, dark, with mestizo features and an Asian trace in his slanted eyes, a very broad forehead, and thinning hair, carefully combed with a center part. He had a small mustache and goatee, recently combed, and he smelled of cologne. The legend of his mania regarding hygiene and attire must be true. He dressed impeccably, wearing a suit of fine wool that may have been cut on Savile Row. He didn’t open his mouth while the other directors interrogated Roger with a thousand questions undoubtedly prepared for them by Arana’s lawyers. They attempted to make him fall into contradictions and insinuated the mistakes, exaggerations, susceptibilities, and scruples of an urbane, civilized European who is disconcerted by the primitive world.

As he responded and added testimonies and precise facts that made what he had told them at the first meeting even worse, Roger did not stop glancing at Arana. As still as an idol, he didn’t move in his seat and didn’t even blink. His expression was indecipherable. There was something inflexible in his hard, cold gaze. It reminded Roger of the eyes, empty of humanity, of the station chiefs on the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the eyes of men who had lost (if they ever possessed it) the capacity to discriminate between good and evil, kindness and wickedness, the human and the inhuman.

This small, elegant, slightly plump man, then, was master of an empire the size of a European country, the hated, adulated master of the lives and property of tens of thousands of people, a man who in that miserably poor world of Amazonia had accumulated a fortune comparable to that of the great potentates of Europe. He had begun as a poor boy in the small forsaken village Rioja must have been, in the high Peruvian jungle, selling from door to door straw hats that his family had woven. Little by little, compensating for his lack of education—only a few years of primary instruction—with a superhuman capacity for work, a brilliant instinct for business, and an absolute lack of scruples, he climbed the social pyramid. From a traveling peddler of hats in vast Amazonia, he became a financial backer of the wretched rubber workers who ventured at their own risk into the jungle, whom he supplied with machetes, carbines, fishing nets, knives, cans for the rubber, canned goods, yucca flour, and domestic utensils in exchange for part of the rubber they harvested, which he took care of selling in Iquitos and Manaus to export companies, until, with the money he had earned, he could move from supplier and agent to producer and exporter. At first he became partners with Colombian rubber planters who, less intelligent or diligent than he, or less lacking in morality, eventually sold their land, depositories, and indigenous laborers to him at a loss, and at times went to work for him. Distrustful, he installed his brothers and brothers-in-law in key positions in the enterprise, which, in spite of its vast size and having been registered on the London stock market since 1908, continued to function in practice like a family business. How great was his fortune? The legend undoubtedly exaggerated the reality. But in London, the Peruvian Amazon Company had this valuable building in the heart of the City, and Arana’s mansion on Kensington Road was in no way inferior to the palaces of princes and bankers that surrounded it. His house in Geneva and his elegant summer home in Biarritz were furnished by fashionable decorators and displayed paintings and luxurious objects. But it was said that he led an austere life, didn’t drink or gamble or have lovers, and dedicated all his free time to his wife. He had loved her since he was a boy—she was also from Rioja—but Eleonora Zumaeta said yes only after many years, when he was already wealthy and powerful and she was a schoolteacher in the small village where she had been born.

When the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company had ended, Julio C. Arana guaranteed through his interpreter that his company would do everything necessary to correct immediately any deficiency or malfunction on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, for it was the policy of his firm to always act within the law and altruistic morality of the British Empire. Arana took his leave of the consul with a nod, not offering his hand.

Writing the
Report on Putumayo
took Roger a month and a half. He began writing it in a room at the Foreign Office, assisted by a typist, but then he preferred to work in his Philbeach Gardens apartment, in Earls Court, next to the beautiful little church of St. Cuthbert and St. Matthias, where he sometimes went to listen to the magnificent organist. And since even there he was interrupted by politicians and members of humanitarian and antislavery organizations and people from the press, for the rumor that his
Report on Putumayo
would be as devastating as the one he had written about the Congo circulated throughout London and gave rise to conjectures and talk in the London gossip columns and rumor mills, he requested authorization from the Foreign Office to travel to Ireland. There, in a room in Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street in Dublin, he completed his work early in March 1911. Congratulations from his superiors and colleagues immediately poured in. Sir Edward Grey himself summoned him to his office to praise his report and at the same time suggest a few minor corrections. The text was immediately sent to the government of the United States so that London and Washington could put pressure on President Leguía, demanding in the name of the civilized world that he put an end to the slavery, torture, abductions, rapes, and annihilation of the indigenous communities, and take those incriminated to court.