The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (41 page)

One day in Dublin, Roger, who had gone to see a doctor about his arthritic pain, was crossing the damp grass on St. Stephen’s Green when he saw a Franciscan waving to him. It was one of the four—the worker-priests—who had gone to Putumayo to establish a mission. They sat on a bench to talk, near the pond with ducks and swans. Their experience had been very hard. The hostility they encountered in Iquitos from the authorities, who obeyed the orders of Arana’s company, did not drive them away—they had the help of the Augustinian fathers—and neither did the attacks of malaria or the insect bites that, during the first months in Putumayo, put their spirit of sacrifice to the test. In spite of the obstacles and mishaps, they managed to settle in the outskirts of El Encanto, in a hut similar to the ones the Huitotos built in their camps. Their relations with the indigenous people, after a beginning when the Indians were sullen and suspicious, had been good, even cordial. The four began to learn Huitoto and Bora and built a crude outdoor church with a roof of palm leaves over the altar. But suddenly the general flight of people of all kinds took place. Managers and employees, artisans and guards, Indian domestics and laborers were leaving as if they had been expelled by some malignant force or an epidemic of panic. When they were alone, the life of the four became more difficult every day. One of them, Father McKey, contracted beriberi. Then, after long discussions, they too chose to leave the place, which seemed to be the victim of a divine curse.

The return of the four was a Homeric journey and a
via crucis
. With the radical decrease in rubber exports and the disorder and depopulation of the stations, the only means of transport out of Putumayo, which were the ships of the Peruvian Amazon Company, especially the
Liberal
, were halted overnight, with no prior warning. That meant the four were cut off from the world, stranded in an abandoned place, with one of their number gravely ill. When Father McKey died, his companions buried him on a knoll and put an inscription on his grave in four languages: Gaelic, English, Huitoto, and Spanish. Then they left, having made no preparations. Some Indians helped them to sail in a pirogue down the Putumayo until it met with the Yavarí. On the long trip the lightweight boat capsized several times and they had to swim to shore. They lost the few possessions they had. On the Yavarí, after a long wait, a boat agreed to carry them to Manaus on condition they not occupy cabins. They slept on deck, and with the rains, the oldest of the three missionaries, Father O’Nety, came down with pneumonia. Finally in Manaus two weeks later, they found a Franciscan convent that took them in. There Father O’Nety died in spite of his companions’ care. He was buried in the convent cemetery. The two survivors, after recovering from their disastrous vicissitudes, were repatriated to Ireland. Now they had taken up again their labor among the industrial workers of Dublin.

Roger remained sitting for a long time under the leafy trees on St. Stephen’s Green. He tried to imagine what all that immense region of Putumayo would be like with the disappearance of the stations, the flight of the natives, the employees, guards, and killers of Arana’s company. Closing his eyes, he fantasized. Fecund nature would cover all the open spaces and clearings with bushes, lianas, underbrush, brambles, and when the forest was reborn, the animals would return to make their lairs. The place would be filled with the songs of birds, the whistles and grunts and shrieks of parrots, monkeys, serpents, capybara, curassows, and jaguars. With the rains and mud slides, in a few years there would be no trace of those camps where human greed and cruelty had caused so much suffering, so many mutilations and deaths. The wood in the buildings would rot in the rain and the houses would collapse, their wood devoured by termites. All kinds of creatures would make burrows and refuges in the debris. In a not very distant future, every trace of humans would have been erased by the jungle.

IRELAND

XIII

He woke, caught between alarm and surprise. Because in the confusion of his nights, on this one the thought of his friend—ex-friend now—Herbert Ward had kept him frightened and tense as he dreamed. But it was not in Africa, where they had met when both were working for the expedition of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, or afterward, in Paris, where Roger had gone to visit Herbert and Sarita several times, but on the streets of Dublin, precisely in the midst of the uproar, the barricades, the shots, the cannon fire, and the great collective sacrifice of Easter Week. Herbert Ward in the middle of the insurgent Irish, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for the independence of Ireland! How could the human mind, given over to sleep, construct such absurd fantasies?

He recalled that a few days earlier the British cabinet had met without reaching any decision regarding the petition for clemency. His lawyer, George Gavan Duffy, had told him. What was going on? Why this new delay? Gavan Duffy thought it was a good sign: there was dissension among the ministers, who had not achieved the required unanimity. There was hope, then. But waiting meant dying many times each day, each hour, each minute.

Thinking of Herbert Ward saddened him. They would never be friends again. The death of the Wards’ son Charles, so young, so handsome, so healthy, on the Neuve Chapelle front in January 1916, had opened a chasm between them that nothing could close. Herbert was the only real friend he had made in Africa. From the first moment he had seen in this man—somewhat older than himself, who had an outstanding personality, had traveled half the world (New Zealand, Australia, San Francisco, Borneo), and was more cultured than all the Europeans around them, including Stanley—someone with whom he had learned a good number of things and with whom he shared concerns and longings. Unlike the other Europeans recruited by Stanley for this expedition in the service of Leopold II, who aspired only to obtaining money and power in Africa, Herbert loved the adventure for its own sake. He was a man of action but had a passion for art, and he approached the Africans with respectful curiosity. He investigated their beliefs, their customs and religious objects, their apparel and adornments, which interested him from an esthetic and artistic, as well as an intellectual and spiritual point of view. Herbert sketched and made small sculptures with African motifs. In their long conversations at nightfall, when they put up the tents, prepared the food, and got ready to rest after the marches and labors of the day, he confided to Roger that one day he would leave all these tasks to devote himself only to being a sculptor and leading an artist’s life in Paris, “the art capital of the world.” His love for Africa never left him. On the contrary, distance and the passage of time had increased it. He recalled the Wards’ London house, 53 Chester Square, filled with African objects. And, above all, his studio in Paris, its walls covered by spears, javelins, arrows, shields, masks, paddles, and knives in all shapes and sizes. Among the stuffed heads of animals on the floor and the animal skins covering leather armchairs, they had spent entire nights recalling their travels through Africa. Frances, the Wards’ young daughter whom they called Cricket, sometimes dressed in native tunics, necklaces, and adornments, and performed a Bakongo dance that her parents accompanied with clapping and monotonous singing.

Herbert was one of the few people to whom Roger confided his disenchantment with Stanley, Leopold II, and the idea that had brought him to Africa: that the Empire and colonization would open to Africans the way to modernization and progress. Herbert agreed completely with him, when they confirmed that the real reason for the presence of Europeans in Africa was not to help the Africans out of paganism and barbarism, but to exploit them with a greed that acknowledged no limits to abuse and cruelty.

But Herbert Ward never took very seriously the progressive conversion of Roger to the nationalist ideology. He tended to mock him, in the affectionate manner typical of him, warning him against tinsel patriotism—flags, anthems, uniforms—which, he would say, always represented, sooner or later, a regression to provincialism, mean-spiritedness, and the distortion of universal values. And yet, this citizen of the world, as Herbert liked to call himself, when faced with the inordinate violence of the world war, had reacted like so many millions of Europeans and had also taken refuge in patriotism. The letter in which he broke off his friendship with Roger was filled with the patriotic sentiment he had once mocked, the love for the flag and his native land that once had seemed primitive and contemptible to him. Imagining Herbert Ward, that Parisian Englishman, involved with the men of Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin, James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, Patrick Pearse’s Volunteers, fighting in the streets of Dublin for the independence of Ireland, was sheer nonsense. And yet, as he waited for dawn, lying on the narrow cot in his cell, Roger told himself that after all, there was something rational in the depths of that irrationality, for in his dream he had tried to reconcile two things he loved and longed for: his friend and his country.

Early in the morning, the sheriff came to announce a visitor. Roger felt his heart racing when he went into the visitors’ room and saw Alice Stopford Green sitting on the single small bench in the narrow room. When she saw him she stood and walked forward, smiling, to embrace him.

“Alice, Alice dear,” Roger said. “How wonderful to see you. I thought we wouldn’t see each other again. At least in this world.”

“It wasn’t easy to obtain this second permit,” Alice said. “But, as you see, my obstinacy finally convinced them. You don’t know how many doors I knocked on.”

His old friend, who usually dressed with studied elegance, and had done so on her previous visit, now wore a rumpled dress, a kerchief tied carelessly around her head, some gray strands peeking out. On her feet were muddied shoes. Not only her attire had become impoverished. Her expression denoted weariness and discouragement. What had happened to her during this time to account for the change? Had Scotland Yard harassed her again? She denied that, shrugging, as if that old episode had no importance. Alice didn’t touch on the petition for clemency and its postponement until the next Council of Ministers. Roger supposed nothing was known yet about this and didn’t mention it either. Instead he told her about the absurd dream he’d had, imagining Herbert Ward mixing with Irish rebels in the middle of the skirmishes and battles of Easter Week in the center of Dublin.

“Gradually more news about how things happened is getting out,” Alice said, and Roger noted that his friend’s voice became sad and enraged at the same time. And he also noticed that, when they heard them talking about the Irish insurrection, the sheriff and guard, standing near them with their backs turned, became rigid and no doubt listened more carefully. He was afraid the sheriff would warn them it was prohibited to speak about this subject, but he didn’t.

“Then have you learned something else, Alice?” he asked, lowering his voice until it became a murmur.

He saw that the historian turned slightly pale as she nodded. She was silent for a long while before answering, as if wondering whether she ought to perturb her friend by bringing up a subject that was painful to him, or as if she had so many things to say about it, she didn’t know where to begin. Finally she chose to answer that though she had heard and still was hearing many versions of what had been experienced in Dublin and some other cities in Ireland the week of the Rising—contradictory things, facts mixed with fantasies, myths, realities, exaggerations, and inventions, which occurred when an event aroused an entire people—she gave a good deal of credit to the testimony above all of Austin, a nephew of hers, a Capuchin monk recently arrived in London. He was a fountain of firsthand information, for he had been there, in Dublin, in the middle of the fighting, as a nurse and spiritual attendant, going from the General Post Office, the general headquarters from which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly directed the uprising, to the trenches on St. Stephen’s Green, where Countess Constance Markievicz commanded the action, with a buccaneer’s large pistol and her impeccable Volunteer’s uniform, to the barricades constructed in the Jacob’s Biscuit Factory and places in Boland’s Mill occupied by the rebels under Éamon de Valera, before the British troops surrounded them. The testimony of Brother Austin, Alice thought, probably came closest to that unreachable truth only future historians would completely reveal.

There was another long silence Roger didn’t dare to interrupt. It was only a few days since he had seen her, but Alice seemed to have aged ten years. She had wrinkles on her forehead and neck, and her hands were covered with spots. Her clear eyes were no longer shining. He noted her sadness but was sure Alice would not cry in front of him. Could it be that clemency had been denied and she didn’t have the courage to tell him?

“Do you know what my nephew remembers most, Roger?” Alice added. “It isn’t the shooting, the bombs, the wounded, the blood, the flames of the fires, the smoke that didn’t let them breathe, but the confusion. The immense, enormous confusion that reigned all week in the revolutionaries’ positions.”

“Confusion?” Roger repeated, very quietly. Closing his eyes, he tried to see, hear, and feel it.

“The immense, enormous confusion,” Alice repeated, with emphasis. “They were prepared to be killed, and at the same time, they experienced moments of euphoria. Incredible moments. Of pride. Of freedom. Even though none of them, not the leaders and not the militants, ever knew exactly what they were doing or what they wanted to do. That’s what Austin says.”

“Did they know at least why the weapons they were expecting hadn’t arrived?” Roger murmured when he saw that Alice had again fallen into a long silence.

“They didn’t know anything about anything. Among themselves they said the most fantastic things. No one could disprove them because nobody knew what the real situation was. Extraordinary rumors circulated that everybody believed because they needed to believe there was a way out of the desperate situation they found themselves in. That a German army was approaching Dublin, for example, and companies, battalions had landed at different points on the island and were advancing toward the capital. That in the interior, in Cork, Galway, Wexford, Meath, Tralee, everywhere, including Ulster, the Volunteers and the Citizen Army had risen up by the thousands, occupying barracks and police stations and advancing from every direction toward Dublin with reinforcements for the besieged fighters. They fought half-dead from thirst and hunger, almost without ammunition, and had all their hopes pinned on unreality.”