The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (39 page)

Staying in the residence of Ambassador Bryce, treated like royalty and hearing himself called Sir Roger wherever he went, he visited a barbershop and had his hair and beard trimmed and his nails manicured. And he renewed his wardrobe in the elegant shops of Washington. Often during this time he thought about the contradictions in his life. Less than two weeks before he had been a poor devil threatened with death in a run-down hotel in Iquitos, and now, an Irishman who dreamed about the independence of Ireland, he was the embodiment of an official sent by the British Crown to persuade the president of the United States to help the Empire demand that the Peruvian government respond forcefully to the ignominy of Amazonia. Wasn’t life an absurdity, a dramatic representation that suddenly turned into farce?

The three days he spent in Washington were dizzying: daily working sessions with officials from the State Department and a long personal interview with the secretary for foreign relations. On the third day he was received at the White House by President Taft in the company of several advisers and the secretary of state. For an instant, before beginning his exposition on Putumayo, Roger had a hallucination: he wasn’t there as a diplomatic representative of the British Crown but as a special envoy of the recently constituted Republic of Ireland. He had been sent by his provisional government to defend the reasons that had led the immense majority of the Irish, in a plebiscite, to break their connections to Great Britain and proclaim independence. The new Ireland wanted to maintain relations of friendship and cooperation with the United States, with whom they shared a devotion to democracy and where a large community of people of Irish background lived.

Roger fulfilled his obligations impeccably. The meeting was supposed to last half an hour but was three times as long, for President Taft, who listened with great attention to his report on the situation of the indigenous people in Putumayo, asked many thoughtful questions and solicited his opinion regarding the best way to oblige the Peruvian government to put an end to the crimes on the rubber plantations. Roger’s suggestion that the United States open a consulate in Iquitos, which would work together with the British to denounce the abuses was well received by the president. And, in fact, a few weeks later, the United States sent a career diplomat, Stuart J. Fuller, to Iquitos as consul.

More than the words he heard, the surprise and indignation with which President Taft and his colleagues listened to his report convinced Roger that from now on the United States would collaborate in a decisive way with Britain in denouncing the situation of the Amazonian Indians.

In London, even though his physical condition was constantly weakened by fatigue and old ailments, he dedicated himself body and soul to completing his new report for the Foreign Office, demonstrating that the Peruvian authorities had not carried out the promised reforms and the Peruvian Amazon Company had boycotted every initiative, making life impossible for Judge Valcárcel and keeping in the Prefecture the report by Rómulo Paredes, whom they had attempted to kill for having described impartially what he had witnessed during the four months (from March 15 to July 15) he spent on Arana’s rubber plantations. Roger began to translate into English a selection of the testimonies, interviews, and various documents Paredes had given him in Iquitos. This material enriched his own report considerably.

He did this at night, because his days were filled with meetings at the Foreign Office where everyone from the chancellor to multiple commissions requested reports, advice, and suggestions regarding the ideas for taking action that the British government was considering. The atrocities a British company was committing in Amazonia that had been the object of a vigorous campaign initiated by the Anti-Slavery Society and
Truth
was supported now by the liberal press and many religious and humanitarian organizations.

Roger insisted that the
Report on Putumayo
be published immediately. He had lost all hope that the silent diplomacy the British government had attempted with President Leguía would have an effect. In spite of resistance from several sectors in the administration, Sir Edward Grey finally agreed and the cabinet approved its publication as a Blue Book. Roger spent many nights awake, smoking constantly and drinking countless cups of coffee, revising the final copy word by word.

The day the definitive text went to the printer at last, he felt so ill that, fearing something might happen if he were alone, he took refuge in the house of his friend Alice Stopford Green. “You look like a skeleton,” she said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the living room. Roger was shuffling his feet and, in a daze, felt that at any moment he would lose consciousness. Almost immediately he fell asleep or fainted. When he opened his eyes, he saw sitting beside him, together and smiling, his sister Nina and Alice.

“We thought you would never wake up,” he heard one of them say.

He had slept close to twenty-four hours. Alice called the family doctor, whose diagnosis was exhaustion. They should let him sleep. He didn’t recall having slept. When he tried to get up his legs folded and he let himself fall back onto the sofa.
The Congo didn’t kill me but the Amazon will
, he thought.

After having some light refreshment, he was able to stand, and a car took him to his Philbeach Gardens apartment. He took a long bath that helped clear his mind. But he felt so weak he had to lie down again.

The Foreign Office obliged him to take a ten-day vacation. He resisted leaving London before the appearance of his report, but he finally agreed to go. Accompanied by Nina, who requested leave from the school where she taught, he spent a week in Cornwall. His fatigue was so great he could barely concentrate on reading. His mind scattered in dissolute images. Thanks to a quiet life and healthy diet, he began recuperating his strength. He could take long walks in the countryside, enjoying some mild days. There could be nothing more different from the pleasant, civilized landscape of Cornwall than Amazonia, and yet, in spite of the well-being and serenity he felt here, seeing the routine of the farmers, the beatific cows grazing, the horses neighing in the stables, with no threat of wild animals, snakes, or mosquitoes, one day he found himself thinking this populated, civilized nature, revealing centuries of agricultural labor in the service of humanity, had lost its state of being part of the natural world—its soul, pantheists would say—compared with the savage, agitated, indomitable, untamed territory of Amazonia, where everything seemed to be coming to life or dying, an unstable, risky, shifting world where a man felt torn out of the present and thrown into the most distant past, in communication with his ancestors, returned to the dawn of human history. And he discovered in surprise that he recalled it all with nostalgia, in spite of the horrors it hid.

The Blue Book on Putumayo was published in July 1912. From the first day it produced an upheaval that, with London as its center, advanced in concentric waves through all of Europe, the United States, and many other parts of the world, especially Colombia, Brazil, and Peru.
The Times
dedicated several pages to it, and an editorial that praised Roger Casement to the skies, saying that once again he had demonstrated exceptional gifts as a “great humanitarian,” and at the same time demanded immediate action against this British company and its shareholders who benefitted financially from an industry that practiced slavery and torture and was exterminating indigenous peoples.

But the praise that moved Roger most was the article written by Edmund D. Morel, his friend and ally in the campaign against Leopold II, king of the Belgians, in the
Daily News
. Commenting on Roger’s report, he said of Roger that he “had never seen as much magnetism in a human being as in him.” Always allergic to public display, Roger did not enjoy in any way this new wave of popularity. Rather, he felt uncomfortable and sought to avoid it. But it was difficult because the uproar caused by his document meant that dozens of British, European, and North American publications wanted to interview him. He received invitations to give lectures at academic institutions, political clubs, religious and charitable centers. A special service on the subject was held in Westminster Abbey, and Canon Herbert Henson gave a sermon harshly attacking the stockholders in the Peruvian Amazon Company for reaping profits from the practice of slavery, murder, and mutilation.

The chargé d’affaires for Great Britain in Peru, Des Graz, reported on the stir caused in Lima by the accusations in Roger’s report. The Peruvian government, fearing an economic boycott by Western countries, announced the immediate implementation of reforms and the dispatch of military and police forces to Putumayo. But Des Graz added that the announcement probably wouldn’t be effective this time either, since there were governmental sectors that viewed the actions cited in Roger’s report as a conspiracy of the British Empire to favor Colombian claims in Putumayo.

The atmosphere of interest in and solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Amazonia awakened in the public by Roger’s document meant that the project of opening a Catholic mission in Putumayo received a great deal of economic support. The Anglican Church had some objections but eventually let itself be convinced by Roger’s arguments after countless meetings, appointments, letters, and dialogues: in a country where the Catholic Church was so deeply rooted, a Protestant mission would awaken suspicions and the Peruvian Amazon Company would be sure to slander it, presenting it as the spearhead of the Crown’s colonizing appetites.

In Ireland and England, Roger had meetings with Jesuits and Franciscans, two orders he had always liked. Ever since he had been in the Congo, he had read about the past efforts of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay and Brazil to organize the Indians, catechize them, and gather them into communities where, while they maintained their traditions of working in common, they practiced an elementary Christianity, which had raised their standards of living and freed them from exploitation and extermination. For that reason, Portugal destroyed the Jesuit missions and plotted until they convinced Spain and the Vatican that the Society of Jesus had become a state within the state and constituted a danger to papal authority and Spanish imperial sovereignty. Nonetheless, the Jesuits did not receive the project of an Amazonian mission with much warmth. On the other hand, the Franciscans adopted it enthusiastically.

This was how Roger became familiar with the efforts of the Franciscan worker-priests in the poorest neighborhoods of Dublin. They labored in factories and workshops and experienced the same difficulties and privations as the workers. Conversing with them, seeing the devotion with which they carried out their ministry as they shared the fate of the disinherited, Roger thought no one was better prepared than these religious men for the challenge of establishing missions in La Chorrera and El Encanto.

Alice Stopford Green, with whom Roger went in a state of euphoria to celebrate the departure for the Peruvian Amazon of the first four Irish Franciscans, predicted:

“Are you sure you still belong to the Anglican Church, Roger? Though you may not realize it, you’re on a one-way road to a papist conversion.”

Among the habitual participants in Alice’s evenings in the abundant library of her house on Grosvenor Road were Irish nationalists: Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics. Roger had never noticed frictions or disputes. After Alice’s observation, he often asked himself during this time if his approach to Catholicism was strictly a spiritual and religious disposition or a political one, a way of committing himself even more closely to the nationalist option, since the immense majority of the supporters of independence in Ireland were Catholic.

In order to somehow escape the pursuit of which he was the object as author of the report, he asked the ministry for a few days more of leave and went to spend them in Germany. Berlin made an extraordinary impression on him. German society, under the Kaiser, seemed a model of modernity, economic development, order, and efficiency. Though brief, this visit helped to make concrete a vague idea he had been turning over in his mind for some time, and from then on it became one of the main points of his political action. To win its freedom, Ireland could not count on the understanding, much less the benevolence, of the British Empire. It was being demonstrated at this time. The mere possibility that the British parliament would again discuss the draft of a law to grant Ireland Home Rule, which Roger and his radical friends considered an insufficient formal concession, had provoked a jingoistic, enraged response not only among conservatives but also in large liberal and progressive sectors, including labor unions and artisans’ guilds. In Ireland, the prospect of the island having administrative autonomy and its own parliament mobilized and inflamed the unionists of Ulster. There were meetings, an army of volunteers was being formed, public collections were made to buy weapons, and tens of thousands of people signed a covenant in which Irishmen of the North proclaimed they would not accept Home Rule if it were approved and would defend Ireland’s remaining in the Empire with their weapons and their lives. Under these circumstances, Roger thought, the supporters of independence ought to seek solidarity with Germany. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Germany was Britain’s most notable rival. In the event of war, the military defeat of Great Britain would open a unique possibility for Irish emancipation. At this time, Roger often repeated to himself the old nationalist saying: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.”

But as he reached these political conclusions that he shared only with nationalist friends on his trips to Ireland, or in London at Alice Stopford Green’s house, it was Britain that showed affection and admiration for what he had done. Thinking about this made him feel ill.

In all this time, in spite of the desperate efforts of the Peruvian Amazon Company to avoid it, each day it was more obvious that the fate of Arana’s enterprise was threatened. Its loss of prestige was accentuated by the scandal produced when Horace Thorogood, a reporter for
The Morning Leader
who went to the firm’s main offices in the City to try to interview the board of directors, received from one of them, Abel Larco, a brother-in-law of Arana, an envelope filled with money. The reporter asked what it meant. Larco replied that the company was always generous to its friends. The reporter, indignant, returned the intended bribe, denounced what had happened in his paper, and the Peruvian Amazon Company had to make a public apology, saying it was a misunderstanding and those responsible for the bribery attempt would be dismissed.