The Dream of the Celt

I

When they opened the door to his cell, the street noise that the stone walls had muffled came in along with the stream of light and a blast of wind, and Roger woke in alarm. Blinking, still confused, struggling to calm down, he saw the shape of the sheriff leaning in the doorway. His flabby face, with its blond mustache and reproachful little eyes, contemplated Roger with a dislike he had never tried to hide. This was someone who would suffer if the British government granted his request for clemency.

“Visitor,” muttered the sheriff, not taking his eyes off him.

He stood, rubbing his arms. How long had he slept? Not knowing the time was one of the torments of Pentonville Prison. In Brixton Prison and the Tower of London he had heard the bells that marked the half hour and the hour; here, thick walls kept the clamor of the church bells along the Caledonian Road and the noise of the Islington market from reaching the prison interior, and the guards posted at the door strictly obeyed the order not to speak to him. The sheriff put handcuffs on him and indicated that he should walk behind. Was his lawyer bringing him good news? Had the cabinet met and reached a decision? Perhaps the sheriff’s gaze was more filled than ever with the anger he inspired in him because his sentence had been commuted. He walked down the long passageway of red brick blackened by grime, past the metal doors of the cells and the discolored walls where every twenty or twenty-five paces a high barred window allowed him to glimpse a small piece of gray sky. Why was he so cold? It was July, the heart of summer, there was no reason for the icy cold that gave him goose bumps.

When he entered the narrow visitors’ room, his heart sank. Waiting for him was not his attorney, Maître George Gavan Duffy, but one of his assistants, a blond, sickly looking young man with prominent cheekbones who dressed like a fop and whom he had seen during the four days of his trial, carrying and fetching papers for the defense lawyers. Why, instead of coming in person, had Maître Gavan Duffy sent one of his clerks?

The young man looked at him coldly. Anger and disgust were in his eyes. What was wrong with this imbecile? He looks at me as if I were vermin, thought Roger.

“Any news?”

The young man shook his head. He inhaled before speaking:

“Regarding the petition for pardon, not yet,” he murmured drily, making a face that made him look even sicklier. “It is necessary to wait for the Council of Ministers to meet.”

The presence of the sheriff and another guard in the small room irritated Roger. Though they remained silent and motionless, he knew they were listening to everything. The idea oppressed his chest and made it difficult for him to breathe.

“But considering recent events,” the blond young man added, blinking for the first time and opening and closing his mouth in an exaggerated way, “everything is more difficult now.”

“Outside news doesn’t reach Pentonville. What happened?”

What if the German admiralty had finally decided to attack Great Britain from the Irish coast? What if the dreamed-of invasion had taken place and the Kaiser’s cannon were at this very moment avenging the Irish patriots shot by the British in the Easter Rising? If the war had taken that direction, his plans would be realized in spite of everything.

“Now it has become difficult, perhaps impossible, to succeed,” the clerk repeated. He was pale, and Roger detected his skull beneath the whitish skin of his complexion. He sensed that behind him the sheriff was smiling.

“What are you talking about? Mr. Gavan Duffy was optimistic about the petition. What happened to make him change his mind?”

“Your diaries,” the young man hissed, making another disgusted face. He had lowered his voice and it was difficult for Roger to hear him. “Scotland Yard found them in your house on Ebury Street.”

He paused for a long time, waiting for Roger to say something. But since he had fallen mute, the clerk gave free rein to his indignation and twisted his mouth:

“My good man, how could you be so stupid?” He spoke slowly, making his rage more obvious. “How could you, my good man, put such things on paper? And if you did, how could you not take the basic precaution of destroying those diaries before embarking on a conspiracy against the British Empire?”

It’s an insult for this fellow to call me “my good man,” Roger thought. Ill-mannered because Roger was at least twice the age of this affected boy.

“Portions of those diaries are circulating everywhere now,” the clerk added, calmer, though his disgust was constant, not looking at him now. “In the admiralty, the minister’s spokesman, Captain Reginald Hall himself, has given copies to dozens of reporters. They’re all over London. In parliament, the House of Lords, Liberal and Conservative clubs, editorial offices, churches. It’s the only topic of conversation in the city.”

Roger did not say anything. He did not move. Once again he had the strange sensation that had taken hold of him many times in recent months, ever since that gray, rainy April morning in 1916 when, numb with cold, he was arrested in the ruins of McKenna’s Fort, in the south of Ireland: this did not have to do with him, they were talking about someone else, these things were happening to someone else.

“I know your private life is not my business, or Mr. Gavan Duffy’s, or anyone’s,” added the young clerk, making an effort to lower the fury that saturated his voice. “This is a strictly professional matter. Mr. Gavan Duffy wanted to bring you up to date regarding the situation. And prepare you. The request for clemency may be compromised. This morning there are already protests in some newspapers, confidences betrayed, rumors regarding the content of your diaries. The favorable public response to the petition might be affected. Merely a supposition, of course. Mr. Gavan Duffy will keep you informed. Do you wish me to give him a message?”

With an almost imperceptible movement of his head, the prisoner refused. He turned immediately afterward, facing the door of the visitors’ room. With his chubby face the sheriff signaled the guard, who unbolted the door and opened it. The return to his cell seemed interminable. During his passage down the long hall with the rocklike walls of blackened red brick, he had the feeling that at any moment he might trip and fall facedown on those damp stones and not get up again. When he reached the metal door of his cell, he remembered: on the day they brought him to Pentonville Prison, the sheriff had told him that, without exception, all the prisoners who occupied this cell had ended up on the gallows.

“Could I take a bath today?” he asked before he went in.

The fat jailer shook his head, looking into his eyes with the same repugnance Roger had detected in the clerk’s gaze.

“You cannot bathe until the day of your execution,” said the sheriff, relishing each word. “And, on that day, only if it’s your final wish. Others, instead of a bath, prefer a good meal. A bad business for Mr. Ellis, because then, when they feel the noose, they shit themselves. And leave the place like a pigsty. Mr. Ellis is the hangman, in case you didn’t know.”

When he heard the door close behind him, he lay facedown on the narrow cot and closed his eyes. It would have been good to feel the cold water from that spout invigorating his skin and turning it blue with cold. In Pentonville the convicts, except for those condemned to death, could bathe with soap once a week in that stream of cold water. And the conditions in the cells were passable. On the other hand, he recalled with a shudder the filth in Brixton, where he had been covered with lice and fleas that swarmed in the mattress on his cot and covered his back, legs, and arms with bites. He attempted to think about that, but over and over he kept remembering the disgusted face and hateful voice of the blond clerk decked out like a dandy whom Maître Gavan Duffy had sent instead of coming in person to give him the bad news.

II

Regarding his birth—on September 1, 1864, in Doyle’s Cottage, Lawson Terrace, in Sandycove, a Dublin suburb—he remembered nothing, of course. Even though he always knew he had seen the light of day in the capital of Ireland, for much of his life he took for granted what his father, Captain Roger Casement, who had served with distinction for eight years in the Third Regiment of Light Dragoons in India, had inculcated in him: his true birthplace was County Antrim, the heart of Ulster, the Protestant and pro-British Ireland where the Casement line had been established since the eighteenth century.

Roger was brought up and educated as an Anglican in the Church of Ireland, like his sister and brothers, Agnes—whom the family called Nina—Charles, and Tom, all three older than he, but since earliest childhood he had intuited that in matters of religion not everything in his family was as harmonious as in other areas. Even for a very young child it was impossible not to notice that his mother, when she was with her sisters and Scots cousins, behaved in a way that seemed to hide something. He would discover what it was when he was an adolescent: even though Anne Jephson had apparently converted to Protestantism in order to marry his father, behind her husband’s back she continued to be a Catholic (“a Papist,” Captain Casement would have said), going to confession, hearing Mass, and taking communion, and in the most jealously guarded of secrets, he himself had been baptized a Catholic at the age of four, during a vacation trip he and his siblings took with their mother to Rhyl, in the north of Wales, to visit their maternal aunts and uncles.

During those years in Dublin, or the times they spent in London and Jersey, Roger had absolutely no interest in religion, though during the Sunday ceremony he would pray, sing, and follow the service with respect in order not to displease his father. His mother had given him piano lessons, and he had a clear, tuneful voice for which he was applauded at family gatherings when he sang old Irish ballads. What really interested him at that time were the stories Captain Casement, when he was in a good humor, recounted to him and his brothers and sister. Stories about India and Afghanistan, especially his battles with Afghans and Sikhs. Those exotic names and landscapes, those travels crossing forests and mountains that concealed treasures, wild beasts, predatory animals, ancient peoples with strange customs and savage gods, fired his imagination. At times the other children were bored by the stories, but young Roger could have spent hours, even days, listening to his father’s adventures along the remote frontiers of the Empire.

When he learned to read, he liked to become involved in the stories of great navigators, the Vikings, Portuguese, Englishmen, and Spaniards who had plowed the world’s seas, vaporizing myths claiming that once you reached a certain point, the ocean water began to boil, chasms opened, and monsters appeared whose gullets could swallow entire ships. Yet if he had to choose between adventures listened to or read, Roger always preferred to hear them from his father’s mouth. Captain Casement had a warm voice and animatedly described in a rich vocabulary the jungles of India or the crags and boulders of the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, where his company of light dragoons was once ambushed by a mass of turbaned fanatics whom the brave British soldiers confronted first with bullets, then with bayonets, and finally with fists and bare hands until they had forced their attackers to withdraw in defeat. But it wasn’t feats of arms that most dazzled young Roger’s imagination, it was the journeys, the opening of paths through landscapes where white men had never walked, the physical prowess of enduring and conquering the obstacles of nature. His father was entertaining but very severe and did not hesitate to whip his children when they misbehaved, even Nina, the little girl, for this was how mistakes were punished in the army, and he had confirmed that only this form of punishment was effective.

Though he admired his father, the parent Roger really loved was his mother, a slender woman who seemed to float instead of walk, who had light eyes and hair, whose extremely soft hands when they tousled his curls or caressed his body at bath time filled him with happiness. One of the first things he would learn—at the age of five or six—was that he could run into his mother’s arms only when the captain was not nearby. His father, true to the Puritan tradition of his family, did not believe in coddling children, since this made them soft in the struggle to survive. In his father’s presence, Roger kept his distance from the pale, delicate Anne Jephson. But when the captain went out to meet friends at his club or take a walk, the boy would run to her and she would cover him with kisses and caresses. At times Charles, Nina, and Tom protested: “You love Roger more than us.” Their mother assured them she did not, she loved them all the same, except Roger was very little and needed more attention and affection than the older ones.

When his mother died, in 1873, Roger was nine years old. He had learned to swim and won all the races with children his age and even older ones. Unlike Nina, Charles, and Tom, who shed many tears during the wake and burial of Anne Jephson, Roger did not cry even once. During those gloomy days, the Casement household was transformed into a funeral chapel filled with people dressed in mourning who spoke in low voices and embraced Captain Casement and the four children with contrite faces, pronouncing words of condolence. For many days he couldn’t say a word, as if he had fallen mute. He responded to questions with movements of his head, or gestures, and remained serious, his head lowered and his gaze lost, even at night in the darkened room, unable to sleep. From then on and for the rest of his life, from time to time in dreams the figure of Anne Jephson would come to visit him with that inviting smile, opening her arms where he would huddle, feeling protected and happy with those slim fingers on his head, his back, his cheeks, a sensation that seemed to defend him against the evils of the world.

His brothers and sister were soon comforted. And Roger too, apparently. Because even though he had recovered his speech, this was a subject he never mentioned. When a relative spoke to him about his mother, he fell silent and remained enclosed in his muteness until the other person changed the subject. In his sleeplessness, he would sense the face of the unfortunate Anne Jephson in the dark, looking at him sadly.

The one who was not comforted and never became himself again was Captain Roger Casement. Since he wasn’t effusive and Roger and the other children had never seen him showering his mother with gallantries, the four of them were surprised at the cataclysm his wife’s disappearance meant for their father. Always so meticulous, he dressed carelessly now, let his beard grow, scowled, his eyes filled with resentment as if his children were to blame for his being a widower. Shortly after Anne’s death, he decided to leave Dublin and sent the four children to Ulster, to Magherintemple House, the family estate, where from then on their paternal great-uncle, John Casement, and his wife, Charlotte, would take charge of their upbringing. Their father, as if wanting to have nothing to do with them, went to live twenty-five miles away, at the Adair Arms Hotel in Ballymena where, as Great-Uncle John let slip occasionally, Captain Casement, “half mad with grief and loneliness,” dedicated his days and his nights to spiritualism, attempting to communicate with the dead woman through mediums, cards, and crystal balls.

From then on Roger rarely saw his father and never again heard him tell those stories about India and Afghanistan. Captain Roger Casement died of tuberculosis in 1876, three years after his wife. Roger had just turned twelve. In Ballymena Diocesan School, where he spent three years, he was a distracted student who received mediocre grades except in Latin, French, and ancient history, classes in which he was outstanding. He wrote poetry, always seemed lost in thought, and devoured books of travels through Africa and the Far East. He engaged in sports, swimming in particular. On weekends he went to the Young family’s Galgorm Castle, invited by a classmate. But Roger neglected him and spent more time with Rose Maud Young, beautiful, well educated, and a writer, who traveled the fishing and farm villages of Antrim collecting poems, legends, and songs in Gaelic. From her mouth he heard for the first time the epic battles of Irish mythology. The castle of black stone, with its fortified towers, coats of arms, chimneys, and cathedral-like facade, had been built in the seventeenth century by Alexander Colville, a theologian with an ill-favored face—according to his portrait in the foyer—who, they said in Ballymena, had made a pact with the devil, and whose ghost walked the castle. On certain moonlit nights, a trembling Roger dared to search for him in passageways and empty rooms but never found him.

Only many years later would he learn to feel comfortable in Magherintemple House, the Casement family’s ancestral home, which had once been called Churchfield and had been a rectory of the Anglican parish of Culfeightrin. Because for the six years he lived there, between the ages of nine and fifteen, with Great-Uncle John and Great-Aunt Charlotte and the rest of his paternal relatives, he always felt something of a foreigner in the imposing mansion of gray stone with its three stories, high ceilings, ivy-covered walls, false Gothic roofs, and hangings that seemed to hide ghosts. The vast rooms, long hallways, and staircases with worn wooden banisters and creaking steps increased his solitude. On the other hand, he enjoyed the outdoors, the robust elms, sycamores, and beech trees that resisted the hurricane-force wind, the gentle hills with cows and sheep where one could see the town of Ballycastle, the ocean, the breakers crashing into Rathlin Island, and on clear days, the blurred silhouette of Scotland. He frequently went to the nearby villages of Cushendun and Cushendall, which seemed to be the setting for ancient Irish legends, and the nine glens of Northern Ireland, those narrow valleys surrounded by hills and rocky slopes at whose peaks eagles traced circles, a sight that made him feel valiant and exalted. His favorite diversions were excursions through that harsh land, its peasants who seemed as old as the landscape, some speaking the old Irish among themselves, about which Great-Uncle John and his friends sometimes made cruel jokes. Charles and Tom did not share his enthusiasm for life in the open air and did not enjoy cross-country hikes or climbing the rugged hills of Antrim, but Nina did, and for that reason, in spite of her being eight years older, she was his favorite sibling, the one he got along with best. He made several excursions with her to the Bay of Murlough, bristling with black rocks, and its stony little beach at the bottom of Glenshesk, which would stay in his memory as long as he lived and to which he would always refer, in letters to his family, as “that corner of Paradise.”

But even more than walks through the countryside, Roger liked summer vacations. He spent them in Liverpool with his aunt Grace, his mother’s sister, in whose house he felt loved and welcomed, by Aunt Grace, of course, but also by her husband, Uncle Edward Bannister, who had traveled much of the world and made business trips to Africa. He worked for the shipping company the Elder Dempster Line, which transported cargo and passengers between Great Britain and West Africa. Aunt Grace and Uncle Edward’s children, his cousins, were better playmates to Roger than his own siblings, especially Gertrude Bannister, or Gee, with whom, from the time he was very young, he had an intimacy never dimmed by any quarrel. They were so close that Nina once joked, “You’ll end up marrying each other.” Gee laughed but Roger blushed to the roots of his hair. He didn’t dare look up and stammered, “No, no, why are you talking nonsense?”

When he was in Liverpool with his cousins, Roger sometimes conquered his timidity and asked Uncle Edward about Africa, a continent whose mere mention filled his head with jungles, wild animals, adventures, and intrepid men. Thanks to Uncle Edward Bannister he heard for the first time of Dr. David Livingstone, the Scots physician and evangelist who had explored the African continent for years, traveling rivers such as the Zambezi and the Shire, naming mountains and unknown places, and bringing Christianity to tribes of savages. He had been the first European to cross Africa coast to coast, the first to traverse the Kalahari Desert, and he had become the most popular hero in the British Empire. Roger dreamed about him, read the pamphlets that described his exploits, and longed to be part of his expeditions, facing dangers at his side, helping to bring the Christian faith to pagans who had not left the Stone Age. When Dr. Livingstone, looking for the sources of the Nile, disappeared, swallowed up by the African jungles, Roger was two years old. When, in 1872, another legendary adventurer and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter of Welsh origin employed by a New York newspaper, emerged from the jungle and announced to the world that he had found Dr. Livingstone alive, Roger was almost eight. The boy followed the heroic story with astonishment and envy. And when, a year later, he learned that Dr. Livingstone, who never wanted to leave African soil or return to Britain, had died, Roger felt he had lost a beloved friend. When he grew up, he too would be an explorer like those titans, Livingstone and Stanley, who were expanding the frontiers of the West and living such extraordinary lives.

When he turned fifteen, Great-Uncle John Casement advised Roger to abandon his studies and look for work, since he and his brothers and sister had no income to live on. He happily accepted the advice. By mutual agreement they decided Roger would go to Liverpool, where there were more possibilities for work than in Northern Ireland. Shortly after he arrived at the Bannisters’, Uncle Edward obtained a position for him in the same company where he had worked for so many years. He began as an apprentice in the shipping firm soon after his fifteenth birthday. He looked older. He was very tall and slim, with deep gray eyes, curly black hair, very light skin, even teeth, and he was temperate, discreet, neat, amiable, and obliging. He spoke English with an Irish accent, the cause of jokes among his cousins.

He was a serious boy, tenacious and laconic, not very well prepared intellectually but hardworking. He took his duties in the company very seriously, determined to learn. He was placed in the Department of Administration and Accounting. At first, his tasks were those of a messenger. He fetched and carried documents from one office to another and went to the port to take care of formalities regarding ships, customs, and warehouses. His superiors treated him with consideration. In the four years he worked at the Elder Dempster Line, he did not become intimate with anyone, due to his retiring manner and austere habits: opposed to carousing, he practically did not drink and was never seen frequenting the bars and brothels in the port. He did become an inveterate smoker. His passion for Africa and his commitment to doing well in the company led him to read carefully, and fill with notes, the pamphlets and publications dealing with maritime trade between the British Empire and West Africa that made the rounds of the offices. Then he would repeat with conviction the ideas that permeated those texts. Bringing European products to Africa and importing the raw materials that African soil produced was, more than a commercial operation, an enterprise in favor of the progress of peoples caught in prehistory, sunk in cannibalism and the slave trade. Commerce brought religion, morality, law, the values of a modern, educated, free, and democratic Europe, progress that would eventually transform tribal unfortunates into men and women of our time. In this enterprise, the British Empire was in the vanguard of Europe, and one had to feel proud of being part of it and the work accomplished at the Elder Dempster Line. His office colleagues exchanged mocking looks and wondered whether young Roger Casement was a fool or a smart aleck, whether he believed that nonsense or declaimed it in order to look good to his superiors.

For the four years he worked in Liverpool, Roger continued to live with Aunt Grace and Uncle Edward, to whom he gave part of his salary and who treated him like a son. He got on well with his cousins, especially Gertrude, with whom on Sundays and holidays he would go boating and fishing if the weather was good, or stay home reading aloud in front of the fire if it rained. Their relationship was fraternal, without a hint of guile or flirtatiousness. Gertrude was the first person to whom he showed the poems he wrote in secret. Roger came to know the company’s activities thoroughly, and without ever having set foot in African ports spoke about them as if he had spent his whole life among their offices, businesses, procedures, customs, and those who populated them.

He made three trips to West Africa on the S.S. Bounny, and the experience filled him with so much enthusiasm that after the third voyage he gave up his job and announced to his siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins that he had decided to go to Africa. He did this in an exalted way, and as his uncle Edward said to him, “like those crusaders in the Middle Ages who left for the East to liberate Jerusalem.” The family went to the port to see him off, and Gee and Nina shed some tears. Roger had just turned twenty.

III

When the sheriff opened the door to the cell Roger was thinking in shame that he had always been in favor of the death penalty. He had made it public a few years earlier, in his “Report on Putumayo” for the Foreign Office, the Blue Book, demanding exemplary punishment for the Peruvian Julio César Arana, the rubber king of Putumayo: “If we could at least achieve his being hanged for those atrocious crimes, it would be the beginning of the end of the interminable martyrdom and infernal persecution of the unfortunate indigenous population.” He would not write those same words now. And he recalled the discomfort he would feel when he entered a house and saw a birdcage. Imprisoned canaries, goldfinches, or parrots had always seemed to him the victims of useless cruelty.

“Visitor,” muttered the sheriff, looking at him with contempt in his eyes and voice. While Roger stood and dusted off his prisoner’s uniform with his hands, he added sarcastically: “You’re in the papers again today, Mr. Casement. Not for being a traitor to your country …”

“My country is Ireland,” Roger interrupted.

“ … but because of your perversions.” The sheriff made a noise with his tongue as if he were going to spit. “A traitor and pervert at the same time. What garbage! It will be a pleasure to see you dancing at the end of a rope, ex–Sir Roger.”

“The cabinet turned down my petition for clemency?”

“Not yet.” The sheriff hesitated before answering. “But it will. And so will His Majesty the king, of course.”

“I won’t petition him for clemency. He’s your king, not mine.”

“Ireland is British,” muttered the sheriff. “Now more than ever after crushing that cowardly Easter Rising in Dublin. A stab in the back of a country at war. I wouldn’t have shot your leaders, I would’ve hanged them.”

He fell silent because they had reached the visitors’ room.

It wasn’t Father Carey, the Catholic chaplain at Pentonville Prison, who had come to see him but Gertrude, Gee, his cousin. She embraced him tightly and Roger felt her trembling in his arms. He thought of a little bird numb with cold. How Gee had aged since his imprisonment and trial. He recalled the mischievous, lively girl in Liverpool, the attractive woman in love with the life of London, whom her friends affectionately called Hoppy because of her damaged leg. Now she was a shrunken, sickly old lady, not the healthy, strong, self-confident woman of a few years earlier. The clear light of her eyes had gone out, and there were wrinkles on her face, neck, and hands. She dressed in dark, worn clothing.

“I must stink like all the rubbish in the world,” Roger joked, pointing at his coarse blue uniform. “They took away my right to bathe. They’ll give it back only once, if I’m to be executed.”

“You won’t be, the Council of Ministers will grant clemency,” Gertrude asserted, nodding to give more force to her words. “President Wilson will intercede with the British government on your behalf, Roger. He’s promised to send a telegram. They’ll grant it, there won’t be an execution, believe me.”

The way she said this was so strained, her voice broke so much, that Roger felt sorry for her, for all his friends who, like Gee, suffered these days from the same anguish and uncertainty. He wanted to ask about the attacks in the papers the jailer had mentioned but controlled himself. The president of the United States would intercede for him? That must be an initiative of John Devoy and other friends from the Clan na Gael. If he did, his action would have an effect. There was still a possibility the cabinet would commute his sentence.

There was no place to sit, and Roger and Gertrude remained standing, very close together, their backs to the sheriff and the guard. The four presences transformed the small visitors’ room into a claustrophobic place.

“Gavan Duffy told me they had dismissed you from Queen Anne’s Academy,” Roger said apologetically. “I know it was on account of me. A thousand pardons, my dear Gee. Causing you harm is the last thing I would have wanted.”

“They didn’t dismiss me, they asked me to accept the cancelation of my contract. And gave me compensation of forty pounds. I don’t care. I’ve had more time to help Alice in the measures she’s taken to save your life. That’s the most important thing now.”

She took her cousin’s hand and squeezed it tenderly. Gee had taught for many years in the school of Queen Anne’s Hospital, in Caversham, where she had become assistant director. She always liked her job and told amusing anecdotes about it in her letters to Roger. And now, because of her kinship to an outcast, she would be unemployed. Did she have enough to live on, or who would help her?

“No one believes the vile things they’re publishing about you,” said Gertrude, lowering her voice a great deal, as if the two men standing there might not hear her. “Every decent person is indignant that the government is using this kind of slander to weaken the manifesto so many important people have signed in your favor, Roger.”

Her voice broke, as if she were going to sob. Roger embraced her again.

“I’ve loved you so much, Gee, dearest Gee,” he whispered in her ear. “And now more than ever. I will always be grateful for how loyal you’ve been in good times and bad. That’s why your opinion is one of the few that matters to me. You know that everything I’ve done has been for Ireland, don’t you? For a noble, generous cause, like the Irish cause. Isn’t that true, Gee?”

She had started to sob, very quietly, her face pressed against his chest.

“You had ten minutes and five have passed,” the sheriff reminded them without turning around to look at them. “You have five left.”

“Now, with so much time to think,” said Roger in his cousin’s ear, “I think a great deal about those years in Liverpool, when we were so young and life smiled on us, Gee.”

“Everybody thought we were in love and would marry one day,” murmured Gee. “I, too, remember that time with nostalgia, Roger.”

“We were more than lovers, Gee. Brother and sister, accomplices. The two sides of a coin. That close. You were many things to me. The mother I lost when I was nine. The friends I never had. I always felt better with you than with my own siblings. You gave me confidence, security in life, joy. Later, during all my years in Africa, your letters were my only bridge to the rest of the world. You don’t know how happy I was to receive your letters and how I read them over and over, dear Gee.”

He fell silent. He didn’t want his cousin to know he was about to cry too. No doubt because of his Puritan upbringing, since childhood he had despised public displays of sentiment, but in recent months he had sometimes indulged certain weaknesses that had once annoyed him so much in others. Gee said nothing. She still embraced him, and Roger felt her agitated respiration raising and lowering her chest.

“You were the only person I showed my poems to. Do you remember?”

“I remember they were dreadful,” said Gertrude. “But I loved you so much I told you they were wonderful. I even memorized one or two.”

“I knew very well you didn’t like them, Gee. It was lucky I never published them. I almost did, you know.”

They looked at each other and began to laugh.

“We’re doing everything, everything to help you, Roger,” said Gee, becoming very serious again. Her voice had aged too; firm and pleasant once, it was hesitant and cracked now. “We who love you, and there are many of us. Alice the first, naturally. Moving heaven and earth. Writing letters, visiting politicians, officials, diplomats. Explaining, pleading. Knocking at every door. She’s doing what she can to see you. It’s difficult. Only kin are permitted. But Alice is well known, she has influence. She’ll obtain permission and will come, you’ll see. Did you know that when the Dublin Rising broke out, Scotland Yard searched her house from top to bottom? They took a good number of papers. She loves and admires you so much, Roger.”

I know, Roger thought. He, too, loved and admired Alice Stopford Green. The Irish historian, like Casement from an Anglican family, whose house was one of the most crowded intellectual salons in London, the center for discussions and meetings of all the nationalists and Home Rulers from Ireland, had been more than a friend and adviser to him in political matters. She had educated him and obliged him to discover and love Ireland’s past, her long history and flourishing culture before she was absorbed by a powerful neighbor. Alice had recommended books, enlightened him in impassioned conversations, urged him to continue his lessons in the Irish language that, unfortunately, he never succeeded in mastering. I’ll die not speaking Gaelic, he thought. And later, when he became a radical nationalist, Alice was the first person in London who began calling him by the nickname Herbert Ward had given him that pleased him so much: “the Celt.”

“Ten minutes,” decreed the sheriff. “Time to say goodbye.”

He felt his cousin embrace him, her mouth trying unsuccessfully to reach his ear, since he was much taller. She spoke, thinning her voice so much it was almost inaudible:

“All those horrible things the papers are saying are slanders, wretched lies. Aren’t they, Roger?”

The question was so unexpected he hesitated a few seconds before answering.

“I don’t know what the press is saying about me, dear Gee. We don’t get papers here. But,” and he searched carefully for his words, “I’m sure they are. I want you to keep just one thing in mind, Gee. And believe what I say. Of course I’ve made many mistakes. But I have nothing to be ashamed of. You and my friends, none of you have to be ashamed of me. You believe me, don’t you, Gee?”

“Of course I believe you.” His cousin sobbed, covering her mouth with both hands.

On his way back to his cell, Roger felt his eyes filling with tears. He made a great effort to keep the sheriff from noticing. He rarely felt like crying. As far as he could recall, he hadn’t cried in all these months since his capture. Not during his questioning at Scotland Yard, or during the hearings at his trial, or listening to the sentence that condemned him to be hanged. Why now? Because of Gertrude. Because of Gee. Seeing her suffer in that way, doubt in that way, meant at the very least that for her, his person and life were precious. He was not, after all, as alone as he felt.

IV

The journey of the British consul, Roger Casement, up the Congo River, which began on June 5, 1903, and would change his life forever, had been scheduled to begin the previous year. He had been suggesting this expedition to the Foreign Office since 1900 when, after serving in Old Calabar (Nigeria), Lourenço Marques (Mozambique), and São Paulo de Luanda (Angola), he officially took up residence as consul of Great Britain in Boma—a misbegotten village—claiming that the best way to prepare a report on the situation of the natives in the Congo Free State was to leave this remote capital for the forests and tribes of the Middle and Upper Congo. That was where the exploitation was occurring that he had been reporting to the Ministry of Foreign Relations since his arrival in these territories. Finally, after weighing those reasons of state that never failed to turn the consul’s stomach, even though he understood them—Great Britain was an ally of Belgium and did not want to push her into Germany’s arms—the Foreign Office authorized him to undertake the journey to the villages, stations, missions, posts, encampments, and factories where the extraction of rubber took place, the black gold avidly coveted now all over the world for tires and bumpers on trucks and cars and countless other industrial and household uses. He had to verify on the ground how much truth there was in the denunciations of atrocities committed against natives in the Congo of His Majesty Leopold II, king of the Belgians, made by the Aborigines’ Protection Society in London, and some Baptist churches and Catholic missions in Europe and the United States.

He prepared the journey with his customary meticulousness and an enthusiasm he hid from Belgian functionaries and the colonists and merchants of Boma. Now, with a thorough knowledge of the subject, he would be able to argue to his superiors that the Empire, faithful to its tradition of justice and fair play, should lead an international campaign to put an end to this ignominy. But then, in the middle of 1902, he had his third attack of malaria, one even worse than the previous two; he had suffered from the disease ever since he had decided in 1884, in an outburst of idealism and a dream of adventure, to leave Europe and come to Africa to work, by means of commerce, for Christianity, western social and political institutions, and the emancipation of Africans from backwardness, disease, and ignorance.

They weren’t merely words. He had a profound belief in them when, at the age of twenty, he reached the Dark Continent. The first attacks of malaria came some time later. He had just realized his life’s desire: to be part of an expedition headed by the most famous adventurer on African soil, Henry Morton Stanley. To serve at the pleasure of the explorer who in a legendary trek of close to three years between 1874 and 1877 had crossed Africa from east to west, following the course of the Congo River from its source to its mouth at the Atlantic! To accompany the hero who found the missing Dr. Livingstone! Then, as if the gods wanted to extinguish his exaltation, he suffered his first attack of malaria. Nothing, compared with the second, three years later—1887—and above all this third attack, in 1902, when for the first time he thought he would die. The symptoms were the same that dawn in the middle of 1902 when, his traveling bag already packed with maps, compass, pencils, and notebooks, he felt himself trembling with cold as he opened his eyes in the bedroom on the top floor of his house in Boma, in the colonists’ district, a few steps from Government House, which served as the consul’s residence and office. He moved aside the mosquito netting and saw through the windows, without glass or curtains but with metal screens to keep out insects and riddled now by a downpour, the muddy waters of the great river and the outline of islands covered with vegetation. He couldn’t stand. His legs collapsed under him, as if they were made of rags. John, his bulldog, was frightened and began to jump and bark. He let himself fall back into bed. His body was burning and the cold penetrated his bones. He shouted for Charlie and Mawuku, the Congolese steward and cook who slept on the lower floor, but no one answered. They must have gone out and, caught by the storm, run to take shelter under a baobab tree until it abated. Malaria again? The consul cursed. Just on the eve of the expedition? He would have diarrhea; hemorrhages and weakness would oblige him to stay in bed for days, weeks, dazed and shivering.

Charlie was the first of the servants to return, dripping water. “Go for Dr. Salabert,” Roger ordered, not in French but in Lingala. Dr. Salabert was one of two physicians in Boma, the old slave-trade port—it was called Mboma then—where, in the sixteenth century, Portuguese traffickers from the island of São Tomé came to buy slaves from the tribal chiefs of the vanished Kingdom of the Kongo, transformed now by the Belgians into the capital of the Congo Free State. Unlike Matadi, in Boma there was no hospital, only a dispensary staffed by two Flemish nuns for emergency cases. The doctor arrived half an hour later, shuffling his feet and leaning on a cane. He was younger than he seemed, but the harsh climate, and especially alcohol, had aged him. He looked like an old man and dressed like a vagabond. His high shoes had no laces and his vest was unbuttoned. Even though the day was just beginning, his eyes were bloodshot.

“Yes, my friend, malaria, what else would it be. What a fever. You know the treatment: quinine, abundant fluids, a diet of broth and biscuits, and lots of blankets to sweat out the infections. Don’t even dream of getting up before two weeks. And certainly not of going on a trip, not even to the corner. Tertian fevers demolish the organism, as you know all too well.”

It wasn’t for two but three weeks that he was devastated by fevers and fits of shivering. He lost twenty pounds, and on the first day he could stand, he took a few steps and fell to the floor exhausted, in a state of weakness he did not recall having felt before. Dr. Salabert, staring into his eyes, warned him in a cavernous voice and with acid humor:

“In your condition it would be suicide to go on that expedition. Your body is in ruins and would not survive even a crossing of the Crystal Mountains, much less several weeks of living outdoors. You wouldn’t even reach Mbanza-Ngungu. There are faster ways to kill yourself, Consul: a bullet in the mouth or an injection of strychnine. If you need them, you can count on me. I’ve helped several people undertake the great journey.”

Roger telegraphed the Foreign Office that the state of his health obliged him to postpone the expedition. And since the rains made the forests and river impassable then, the expedition to the interior of the Congo Free State had to wait a few more months that would eventually turn into a year. Another year, recovering very slowly from the fevers and trying to regain the weight he had lost, picking up the tennis racket again, swimming, playing bridge or chess to pass the long nights in Boma, while he resumed his tedious consular tasks: making note of the ships that arrived and departed, the goods the merchant ships of Antwerp unloaded—rifles, munitions, chicote whips, wine, holy pictures, crucifixes, colored glass beads—and the ones they carried to Europe, the immense stacks of rubber, ivory, and animal skins. This was the exchange that in his youthful imagination was going to save the Congolese from cannibalism and from the Arab merchants of Zanzibar who controlled the slave trade, and open the doors of civilization to them!

For three weeks he was laid low by malarial fevers, at times delirious, taking drops of quinine dissolved in herbal infusions that Charlie and Mawuku prepared for him three times a day—his stomach tolerated only broth and pieces of boiled fish or chicken—and playing with John, his most loyal companion. He did not even have the energy to concentrate on reading.

During this forced inactivity, Roger often thought about the expedition of 1884 under the leadership of his hero, Henry Morton Stanley. He had lived in the forests, visited countless indigenous villages, made camp in clearings surrounded by stockades of trees where monkeys screeched and wild beasts roared. He was tense and happy in spite of the bites of mosquitoes and other insects, against which rubbing with camphorated alcohol was useless. He swam in lagoons and rivers of dazzling beauty with no fear of crocodiles, still convinced that by doing what they were doing, he, the four hundred African porters, guides, and assistants, the twenty whites—English, German, Flemish, Walloon, French—who made up the expedition, and, of course, Stanley himself, constituted the tip of the lance of progress in this world where the Stone Age that Europe had left behind many centuries earlier was only just beginning to be visible.

Years later, in the visionary half-sleep of fever, he blushed to think how blind he had been. He had not even been aware, at first, of the reason for the expedition led by Stanley and financed by the king of the Belgians, then considered—by Europe, the West, the world—to be a great humanitarian monarch bent on exterminating the social degradations of slavery and cannibalism and freeing the tribes from the paganism and servitude that kept them in a feral state.

It would be another year before the great Western powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885 granted Leopold II the Congo Free State, more than a million square miles—eighty-five times the size of Belgium—but the king of the Belgians had already begun to administer the territory they were going to give him so he could put his redemptive principles into practice with the estimated twenty million Congolese believed to inhabit it. The monarch with the combed beard had contracted the great Stanley to that end, guessing, with his prodigious aptitude for detecting human weaknesses, that the explorer was equally capable of great deeds and formidable villainies if the prize was on a level with his appetites.

The apparent reason for the 1884 expedition in which Roger served his apprenticeship as an explorer was to prepare the communities scattered along the banks of the Upper, Middle, and Lower Congo, in thousands of miles of dense jungles, gorges, waterfalls, and mountains thick with vegetation, for the arrival of the European merchants and administrators that the International Congo Society (AIC), presided over by Leopold II, would bring in once the Western powers granted him the concession. Stanley and his companions had to explain to the half-naked chieftains, tattooed and feathered, sometimes with thorns in their faces and arms, sometimes with reed funnels on their penises, the benevolent intentions of the Europeans: they would come to help them improve their living conditions, rid them of deadly plagues such as sleeping sickness, educate them, and open their eyes to the truths of this world and the next, thanks to which their children and grandchildren would attain a life that was decent, just, and free.

I wasn’t aware because I didn’t want to be aware, he thought. Charlie had covered him with all the blankets in the house. In spite of that and the blazing sun outside, the consul, curled up and freezing, trembled beneath the mosquito net like a sheet of paper. But worse than being a willing blind man was finding explanations for what any impartial observer would have called a swindle. Because in all the villages reached by the expedition of 1884, after distributing beads and trinkets, and then the aforementioned explanations made by interpreters (many of whom could not make themselves understood by the natives), Stanley had the chiefs and witch doctors sign contracts, written in French, pledging to provide manual labor, lodging, guides, and food to the officials, agents, and employees of the AIC in the work they would undertake to achieve the goals that inspired the Society. They signed with Xs, lines, blots, drawings, without a word and without knowing what they were signing or what signing was, amused by the necklaces, bracelets, and adornments of colored glass they received and the little swallows of liquor with which Stanley invited them to toast their agreement.

They don’t know what they’re doing, but we know it’s for their good and that justifies the deceit, the young Roger Casement thought. What other way was there to do it? How could they give legitimacy to future colonization with people who could not understand a word of those “treaties” in which their future and the future of their descendants was placed under obligation? It was necessary to give some legal form to the enterprise the Belgian monarch wanted to realize by means of persuasion and dialogue, unlike others carried out with blood and fire, invasions, assassinations, and plunder. Wasn’t this peaceable and civil?

As the years passed—eighteen had gone by since the expedition carried out under Stanley’s leadership in 1884—Roger reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted onto the continent of Africa. In spite of that, like everyone who had worked under his command, he could not fail to acknowledge his charisma, his affability, his magic, that mixture of temerity and cold calculation with which the adventurer accumulated great feats. He came and went through Africa, on one hand sowing desolation and death—burning and looting villages, shooting natives, flaying the backs of his porters with the chicotes made of strips of hippopotamus hide that had left thousands of scars on ebony bodies throughout Africa—and on the other opening routes to commerce and evangelization in immense territories filled with wild beasts, predatory insects, and epidemics, which seemed to respect him like one of those titans of Homeric legends and biblical histories.

“Don’t you sometimes feel remorse, have a bad conscience because of what we’re doing?”

The question burst from the young man’s lips in an unpremeditated way. And he could not take it back. The flames from the bonfire in the center of the camp crackled as small branches and imprudent insects burned there.

“Remorse? A bad conscience?” The head of the expedition wrinkled his nose and the expression on his freckled, sunburned face soured, as if he never had heard those words and was trying to guess what they meant. “For what?”

“For the contracts we have them sign,” said young Roger, overcoming his embarrassment. “They place their lives, their villages, everything they have, in the hands of the International Congo Society. And not one of them knows what he’s signing because none of them speaks French.”

“If they knew French, they still wouldn’t understand those contracts.” The explorer laughed his frank, open laugh, one of his most amiable attributes. “I don’t even understand what they mean.”

He was a strong, very short man, almost a midget, still young, with an athletic appearance, flashing gray eyes, thick mustache, and an irresistible personality. He always wore high boots, a pistol at his waist, and a light jacket with a good number of pockets. He laughed again, and the overseers of the expedition, who with Stanley and Roger drank coffee and smoked around the fire, laughed too, adulating their leader. But Roger did not laugh.

“I do, though it’s true the rigmarole they’re written in seems intentional, so they won’t be understood,” he said, respectfully. “It comes down to something very simple. They give their lands to the AIC in exchange for promises of social assistance. They pledge to support the construction projects: roads, bridges, docks, factories. To supply the labor needed for the camps and public order and feed the officials and workers for as long as the work continues. The Society offers nothing in return. No salaries, no compensation. I always believed we were here for the good of the Africans, Mr. Stanley. I’d like you, whom I’ve admired since I was a boy, to give me reasons to go on believing it’s true. That these contracts are, in fact, for their good.”

There was a long silence, broken by the crackling of the fire and occasional growls of night animals out hunting for food. It had stopped raining a while ago but the atmosphere was still humid and heavy, and it seemed that all around them everything was germinating, growing, becoming dense. Eighteen years later, in the disordered images the fever sent whirling around his head, Roger recalled the look, inquisitive, surprised, mocking at moments, with which Henry Morton Stanley inspected him.

“Africa wasn’t made for the weak,” he said at last, as if talking to himself. “The things that worry you are signs of weakness. In the world we’re in, I mean. This isn’t the United States or England, as you must realize. In Africa the weak don’t survive. They’re finished off by bites, fevers, poisoned arrows, or the tsetse fly.”

He was Welsh but must have lived a long time in the United States, because his English had North American tonalities, expressions, and turns of phrase.

“All of this is for their good, of course it is,” Stanley added with a movement of his head toward the circle of conical huts in the hamlet on whose outskirts their camp was located. “Missionaries will come to lead them out of paganism and teach them that a Christian shouldn’t eat his neighbor. Physicians will vaccinate them against epidemics and cure them better than their witch doctors. Companies will give them work. Schools will teach them civilized languages. They’ll be taught how to dress, how to pray to the true God, how to speak like a Christian and not use those monkey dialects. Little by little their barbaric customs will be replaced by those of modern, educated people. If they knew what we’re doing for them, they’d kiss our feet. But mentally they are closer to the crocodile and the hippopotamus than to you or me. That’s why we decide what is good for them and have them sign those contracts. Their children and grandchildren will thank us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if in a little while they begin to worship Leopold the Second the way they worship their fetishes and hideous objects.”

Where on the great river was that camp? He thought vaguely it was between Bolobo and Chumbiri and the tribe belonged to the Bateke. But he wasn’t sure. That data appeared in his diaries, if you could give that name to the hodgepodge of notes scattered in notebooks and on loose sheets of paper over the course of so many years. In any event, he remembered that conversation clearly, as well as his uneasiness when he lay down on his cot after the exchange with Henry Morton Stanley. Was that the night his personal holy trinity of the three Cs began to fall apart? Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Christianity, civilization, and commerce. From the time he was a modest assistant accountant at the Elder Dempster Line in Liverpool, he had assumed there was a price to pay. It was inevitable that abuses would be committed. Among the colonizers there would be not only altruists such as Dr. Livingstone but abusive scoundrels as well, but in the final analysis, the benefits would far outweigh the harm. Life in Africa was showing him that things were not as clear as they had been in theory.

In the year he worked in the explorer’s service, still admiring the audacity and ability to command with which Henry Morton Stanley led his expedition through the largely unknown territory bordering the Congo River and its myriad tributaries, Roger also learned that the explorer was a walking mystery. The things said about him were always contradictory, so it was impossible to know which were true and which false and how much exaggeration and fantasy were in the true statements. He was one of those men incapable of differentiating reality from fiction.

The only clear thing was that the idea of Stanley as a great benefactor to the natives did not correspond to the truth. He learned this listening to the overseers who had accompanied Stanley on his journey of 1871 in search of Dr. Livingstone, an expedition, they said, much less peaceable than this one, on which, no doubt following the instructions of Leopold II, he proved to be more careful in his dealings with the tribes whose chieftains—450 in all—he had sign the allocation of their lands and workforce. The things those rough men, dehumanized by the jungle, recounted of the expedition of 1871 made his hair stand on end. Villages decimated, chiefs decapitated, their women and children shot if they refused to feed the members of the expedition or provide them with porters, guides, and men to cut trails through the jungle. These old associates of Stanley feared him and accepted his reprimands in silence and with their eyes lowered. But they had blind confidence in his decisions and spoke with religious reverence of his famous 999-day journey, between 1874 and 1877, when all the other whites and a good part of the Africans had died.

When, in February 1885, at the Berlin Conference that not a single Congolese attended, the fourteen participating powers, headed by Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, graciously ceded to Leopold II—at whose side Henry Morton Stanley was a constant presence—the million square miles of the Congo and its twenty million inhabitants so that he “would open the territory to commerce, abolish slavery, and civilize and Christianize the pagans,” Roger, who had just turned twenty-one and had lived for a year in Africa, celebrated the event. So did all the employees of the International Congo Society who, anticipating this concession, had already spent time in the territory, establishing the foundations of the project the monarch was ready to carry out. Roger was strong, very tall, slim, with intensely black hair and beard, deep gray eyes, and little propensity for jokes, a laconic boy who seemed a mature man. His preoccupations disconcerted his associates. Who among them took seriously the story about the “civilizing mission of Europe in Africa” that obsessed the young Irishman? But they appreciated him because he was hardworking and always prepared to lend a hand and take over a shift or an assignment for anyone who asked. Except for smoking, he seemed free of vices. He drank almost no alcohol and when, in the camps, tongues were loosened by drink and the talk turned to women, he was clearly uncomfortable and wanted to leave. He was a tireless explorer of the jungle and an imprudent swimmer in rivers and lagoons, energetically moving his arms in front of somnolent hippopotamuses. He had a passion for dogs, and his companions recalled the day during the expedition of 1884 when a wild boar buried its tusks in his fox terrier, named Spindler, and he suffered an emotional crisis when he saw the small animal bleeding to death, its flank torn open. Unlike the other Europeans on the expedition, money did not matter to him. He had not come to Africa dreaming of becoming rich but was moved instead by incomprehensible ideas such as bringing progress to the savages. He spent his salary of eighty pounds sterling a year on his associates. He lived frugally. He did, however, care for his person, dressing carefully, washing himself and combing his hair at mealtimes as if instead of camping in a clearing or on a river beach he were in London, Liverpool, or Dublin. He had a facility for languages, had learned French and Portuguese, and managed to speak several words of their African dialect after spending a few days near a tribe. He was always making notes in student copybooks of what he saw. Someone found out he wrote poetry. They made a joke about it and embarrassment barely permitted him to stammer a denial. He once confessed that when he was a boy, his father would beat him with a strap, and for that reason he was angered by the overseers when they whipped the natives if they dropped a load or failed to carry out an order. He had the gaze of a dreamer.

When Roger thought of Stanley he was hampered by contradictory feelings. He continued to recuperate slowly from malaria. The Welsh adventurer had seen in Africa only a pretext for dramatic exploits and personal plunder. But how could he deny he was one of those mythical, legendary beings who, by means of daring, scorn for death, and ambition, seem to have shattered the limits of the human? He had seen him carry in his arms children whose faces and bodies were eaten by smallpox, offer water from his own canteen to natives dying of cholera or sleeping sickness, as if no one could infect him. Who had this champion of the British Empire and the ambitions of Leopold II actually been? Roger was certain the mystery would never be revealed and his life would always remain hidden behind a spider’s web of inventions. What was his real name? He had taken the name of Henry Morton Stanley from a New Orleans merchant who, in the dark years of his youth, was generous to him and perhaps adopted him. It was said his real name was John Rowlands, but he never confirmed that to anyone. Or that he had been born in Wales and spent his childhood in one of those orphanages where children who had been picked up on the street by health officials were sent. Apparently, when he was very young, he left for the United States as a stowaway on a freighter, and there, during the Civil War, fought first in the Confederate ranks as a soldier, and then on the Yankee side. Afterward, it was thought, he had become a reporter and written articles about the advance of the pioneers into the west and their battles with the Indians. When the New York Herald sent him to Africa in search of David Livingstone, Stanley had no experience at all as an explorer. How did he survive the trek through virgin forests, like someone searching for a needle in a haystack, and succeed in finding in Ujiji, on November 10, 1871, the man he stupefied, according to his boastful confession, with his greeting: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Of all Stanley’s accomplishments, the one Roger Casement had admired most in his youth, even more than his expedition from the sources of the Congo River to its outlet into the Atlantic, was the construction of the caravan trail between 1879 and 1881. The caravan route opened a way for European commerce from the mouth of the great river to the pool, an enormous fluvial lagoon that, as years passed, would be named for the explorer: the Stanley Pool. Afterward, Roger discovered this was another of the farsighted operations of the king of the Belgians to create the infrastructure that would permit the territory to be exploited following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Stanley was the audacious executor of that design.

“And I,” Roger would often tell his friend Herbert Ward during his African years, as he was becoming aware of what the Congo Free State meant, “was one of his foot soldiers from the beginning.” Though not exactly, since when he reached Africa, Stanley had already spent five years opening the caravan trail, whose first section, from Vivi to Isanguila, fifty miles up the Congo River, was completed at the beginning of 1880 and consisted of tangled, fever-ridden jungle filled with deep ravines, worm-infested trees, and putrid swamps where the tops of the trees blocked the sunlight. From there to Muyanga, some seventy-five turbulent miles, the Congo was navigable for pilots familiar with those waters, able to avoid whirlpools and, when it rained and the water rose, to take shelter in shallows or caves and not be tossed against the rocks and destroyed in the rapids that appeared and disappeared endlessly. When Roger began to work for the AIC, changed after 1885 into the Congo Free State, Stanley had already founded, between Kinshasa and Ndolo, the station he called Leopoldville. It was December 1881, three years before Roger reached the jungle and four before the Congo Free State would be legally born. By then this colonial possession, the largest in Africa, created by a monarch who would never set foot in it, was a commercial reality to which European businessmen had access from the Atlantic, overcoming the obstacle of a Lower Congo made impassable by rapids, cataracts, and the twists and bends of the Livingstone Falls, thanks to the route Stanley opened over almost three hundred miles between Boma and Vivi to Leopoldville and the pool. When Roger came to Africa, bold merchants, the advance guard of Leopold II, were beginning to go deep into Congolese territory and take out the first ivory, skins, and baskets of rubber from a region filled with trees that oozed black latex, within reach of anyone who wanted to harvest it.

During his early years in Africa, Roger traveled the caravan route upriver several times, from Boma and Vivi to Leopoldville, or downriver, from Leopoldville to the river’s mouth at the Atlantic, where the dense green waters became salty and where, in 1482, the caravel of the Portuguese Diego Cão entered Congolese territory for the first time. Roger came to know the Lower Congo better than any other European residing in Boma or Matadi, the two points from which Belgian colonization advanced toward the interior of the continent.

For the rest of his life, Roger lamented—he said it again now, in 1902, in his fever—dedicating his first eight years in Africa to working, like a pawn in a game of chess, on the building of the Congo Free State, investing his time, health, effort, and idealism, and believing that in this way he was contributing to a philanthropic plan.

At times, searching for justifications, he asked himself: How could I have realized what was going on in those million square miles, working as an overseer or crew leader in Stanley’s expedition of 1884 and in the North American Henry Shelton Sanford’s expedition, between 1886 and 1888, in stations and factories recently established along the caravan route? He was only a tiny piece of the gigantic apparatus that had begun to take form, and no one except its astute creator and a close group of collaborators knew of what it would consist.

Still, on the two occasions he had spoken with the king of the Belgians in 1900, when he had recently been named consul in Boma by the Foreign Office, Roger felt a deep mistrust of that large, robust man covered in decorations, with his long combed beard, formidable nose, and a prophet’s eyes who, knowing that the diplomat was in Brussels on his way to the Congo, invited him to supper. The magnificence of the palace with its deep, soft carpets, crystal chandeliers, engraved mirrors, and Asian statuettes made him dizzy. There were a dozen guests in addition to Queen Marie Henriette, the King’s daughter Princess Clémentine, and Prince Victor Napoléon of France. The monarch monopolized the conversation the entire night. He spoke like an inspired preacher, and when he described the cruelties of the Arab slave traders who left Zanzibar to make their “runs,” his strong voice attained mystic intonations. Christian Europe had an obligation to put a stop to that traffic in human flesh. He had proposed this and it would be the offering of little Belgium to civilization: liberating a suffering humanity from such horror. The elegant ladies yawned, Prince Napoléon murmured gallantries to the lady next to him, and no one listened to the orchestra playing a Haydn symphony.

The following morning Leopold II summoned the British consul for a private conversation. He received him in his private reception room. There were many porcelain objects and figurines of jade and ivory. The monarch smelled of cologne and had shiny nails. As on the previous evening, Roger could scarcely get in a word. The king of the Belgians spoke of his quixotic quest and how misunderstood it was by journalists and resentful politicians. Errors were committed and there were excesses, no doubt. The reason? It was not easy to contract honorable, capable people willing to risk working in the distant Congo. He asked the consul to inform him personally if, in his new post, he observed anything that needed correction. Roger had the impression that the king of the Belgians was pompous and self-involved.

Now, two years later, in 1902, he told himself the king undoubtedly was both those things, but also a statesman of cold, Machiavellian intelligence. As soon as the Congo Free State had been established, Leopold II, by means of a decree in 1886, reserved as Domaine de la Couronne some 100,000 square miles between the Kasai and Ruki Rivers, which his explorers—principally Stanley—had indicated were rich in rubber trees. This expanse lay outside all the concessions to private enterprises and was intended for exploitation by the sovereign. The International Congo Society was replaced as a legal entity by l’État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State, whose only president and trustee was Leopold II.

Explaining to international public opinion that the only effective way to suppress the slave trade was with a “security force,” the king sent two thousand soldiers from the regular Belgian army to the Congo, to be supplemented by a militia of ten thousand natives, whose maintenance would be assumed by the Congolese population. Even though most of this army was under the command of Belgian officers, its ranks, and above all the leadership positions in the militia, were permeated by individuals of the worst kind, scoundrels, ex-convicts, adventurers hungry for a fortune, who had come from the low districts of vice dens and brothels in Europe. The Force Publique became embedded, like a parasite in a living organism, in the tangle of villages scattered over a region the size of Europe, measured from Spain to the borders of Russia, that would be maintained by an African community who did not understand what was happening to them, except that the invasion that overtook them was a plague more devastating than slave hunters, locusts, red ants, and incantations that brought the sleep of death. Because the soldiers and militiamen of the Force Publique were greedy, brutal, and insatiable when it came to food, drink, women, animals, skins, ivory—in short, everything that could be stolen, eaten, drunk, sold, or violated.

At the same time the exploitation of the Congolese began in this way, the humanitarian monarch, following another of the mandates he had received, started to grant concessions to businesses in order to “open by means of commerce the road to civilization for the natives of Africa.” Some traders died, overcome by malaria, bitten by snakes, or devoured by wild beasts due to their ignorance of the jungles, and another few fell to the poisoned arrows and spears of natives who dared rebel against these outsiders who had weapons that exploded like thunder or burned like lightning; the colonists explained to them that according to contracts signed by their chiefs, they had to abandon their planting, fishing, hunting, rituals, and routines to become guides, porters, hunters, or harvesters of rubber without any salary at all. A good number of concessionaires, friends and favorites of the Belgian monarch, himself above all, made great fortunes in a very short time.

By means of the system of concessions, companies spread through the Congo Free State in concentric waves, penetrating deeper and deeper into the immense region bathed by the Middle and Upper Congo and its spider’s web of tributaries. In their respective domains, they enjoyed sovereignty. In addition to being protected by the Force Publique, they counted on their own militias, always headed by some ex-soldier, ex-jailer, ex-convict, or fugitive, some of whom would become famous throughout all of Africa for their savagery. In a few years the Congo became the world’s leading producer of the rubber the civilized world demanded in larger and larger quantities for carriages, automobiles, and trains, in addition to other kinds of transport, apparel, decoration, and irrigation.

Roger Casement was not fully conscious of any of this in the eight years—1884 to 1892—when, working very hard, suffering from malaria, turning dark in the African sun, becoming covered with scars from the bites, scratches, and gashes of plants and insects, he labored tenaciously to support the commercial and political creation of Leopold II. What he did know about was the appearance and domination in those infinite domains of the symbol of colonization: the chicote whip.

Who invented that delicate, manageable, and efficacious instrument for rousing, frightening, and punishing indolence, clumsiness, or stupidity in those ebony-colored bipeds who never managed to do things in the way the colonists expected, whether it was working in camp, handing over the manioc (kwango), antelope or wild boar meat, and other foodstuffs assigned to each village or family, or the taxes to pay for the public works the government was building? It was said the inventor had been a captain in the Force Publique named M. Chicot, a Belgian in the first wave, a man apparently both practical and imaginative and endowed with sharp powers of observation, for he noticed before anyone else that the extremely tough hide of the hippopotamus could be fashioned into a whip more durable and damaging than those made of equine and feline intestines, a vine-like cord able to produce more burning, blood, scars, and pain than any other scourge, and at the same time light and functional, for curled into a small wooden haft, overseers, orderlies, guards, jailers, and foremen could wrap it around their waist or hang it over their shoulder almost without realizing they were carrying it because it weighed so little. Its mere presence among the members of the Force Publique had an intimidating effect: the eyes of black men, women, and children grew large when they saw it, the whites of their eyes gleamed with terror in their deep-black or blue-black faces, imagining that after any mistake, slip, or failing, the chicote would rip through the air with its unmistakable whistle and fall on their legs, buttocks, and backs, making them shriek.

One of the first concessionaires in the Congo Free State was the North American Henry Shelton Sanford. He had been Leopold II’s agent and lobbyist to the United States government and a key player in the monarch’s strategy for having the great powers cede him the Congo. In June 1886 he formed the Sanford Exploring Expedition (SEE) to trade in ivory, chewing gum, rubber, palm oil, and copper throughout the Upper Congo. Foreigners who worked for the International Congo Society, like Roger, were transferred to the SEE and their old jobs taken over by Belgians. Roger worked for the Sanford Exploring Expedition for 150 pounds a year.

He began in September 1886 as an agent in charge of stores and transport in Matadi, which means “stone” in Kikongo. When Roger moved there, the station built along the caravan route was little more than a jungle clearing opened with machetes on the banks of the great river. Four centuries earlier the caravel of Diego Cão sailed that far, and the Portuguese navigator had carved his name on a rock, still legible today. A firm of German architects and engineers began to build the first house out of pine imported from Europe—importing wood to Africa!—and docks and depositories, work that one morning—Roger clearly recalled the mishap—was interrupted by a sound like an earthquake and the eruption into the clearing of a herd of elephants that almost made the new settlement disappear. Roger spent six, eight, fifteen, eighteen years seeing the tiny village that he began building with his own hands to serve as a depository for the merchandise of the SEE expand, climbing the gentle hills nearby, enlarging the colonists’ squared, two-story wooden houses with long terraces, conical roofs, small gardens, windows protected by metal screens, and filling with streets, corners, and people. In addition to the first small Catholic church in Kinkanda, now in 1902 there was another, more important one, the Church of Notre Dame Médiatrice, and a Baptist mission, a pharmacy, a hospital with two physicians and several nursing nuns, a post office, a beautiful railroad station, a commissary, a court, several customs depots, a solid wharf, and shops selling clothing, food, canned goods, hats, shoes, and farming implements. Around the colonists’ city a variegated district of Bakongo huts of reeds and mud had arisen. Here in Matadi, Roger told himself at times, the Europe of civilization, modernity, and the Christian religion was much more present than in Boma, the capital. Matadi already had a small cemetery on Tun-duwa Hill, next to the mission. From that height it overlooked both banks and a long stretch of the river. Europeans were buried there. Only natives who worked as servants or porters and had an identification pass circulated in the city and along the wharf. Any others who violated those limits were expelled from Matadi forever, after paying a fine and receiving some lashes with a chicote. In 1902, the governor-general still could boast that in Boma and Matadi not a single robbery, homicide, or rape had been recorded.

Roger would always remember two events from the two years he worked for the Sanford Exploring Expedition, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four: the months-long transport of the Florida along the caravan route from Banana, the tiny port at the mouth of the Congo River, to Stanley Pool, and the incident with Lieutenant Francqui: for once breaking the serenity of his even temper, joked about by Herbert Ward, he almost threw Francqui into the whirlpools of the Congo River and escaped being shot by the lieutenant only by a miracle.

The Florida was an imposing ship the SEE brought to Boma to serve as a merchant vessel in the Middle and Upper Congo, that is, on the other side of the Crystal Mountains. Livingstone Falls, the chain of cataracts that separated Boma and Matadi from Leopoldville, ended in a cluster of whirlpools that earned the name Devil’s Cauldron. Starting there and going east, the river was navigable for thousands of miles. But to the west it lost a thousand feet in height as it descended to the ocean, making the river impassable for great distances. In order to be carried by land to Stanley Pool, the Florida was disassembled into hundreds of pieces that, classified and packed, traveled on the shoulders of native porters for the three hundred miles of the caravan route. Roger was entrusted with the largest, heaviest piece: the ship’s hull. He did everything, from supervising the construction of the enormous wagon onto which it was hoisted to recruiting the hundred or so porters and trail cutters who hauled the immense load across the peaks and ravines of the Crystal Mountains, widening the trail with machetes. And constructing embankments and defenses, building camps, treating the sick and those hurt in accidents, suppressing disputes among members of different ethnic groups, and organizing shifts of guard duty, the distribution of food, and hunting and fishing when supplies ran short. It was three months of risk and worry, but also of enthusiasm and the awareness of doing something that signified progress, a successful battle against a hostile nature. And, Roger would often repeat in years to come, without using the chicote or permitting its abuse by those overseers nicknamed “Zanzibarians,” either because they came from Zanzibar, capital of the slave trade, or behaved with the cruelty of traffickers.

When, in the great fluvial lagoon of Stanley Pool, the Florida was reassembled and ready to sail, Roger traveled in the ship along the Middle and Upper Congo, securing depositories and transport for the goods of the Sanford Exploring Expedition in localities that, years later, he would visit again during his journey to hell in 1903: Bolobo, Lukolela, the region of Irebu, and, finally, the Equator Station, renamed Coquilhatville.

The incident with Lieutenant Francqui, who, unlike Roger, felt no repugnance at all toward the chicote and used it freely, occurred on his return from a trip to the line of the Equator some thirty miles upriver from Boma, in a wretched, nameless village. Lieutenant Francqui, in command of eight soldiers of the Force Publique, all of them natives, had carried out a punitive expedition on account of the eternal problem of laborers. More were always needed to carry goods for the expeditions that came and went between Boma–Matadi and Leopoldville–Stanley Pool. Since the tribes resisted handing over their people for that exhausting work, from time to time the Force Publique or private concessionaires undertook incursions into refractory villages where, in addition to taking away the able-bodied men tied together in lines, huts were burned, hides, ivory, and animals confiscated, and the chiefs whipped soundly so that in the future they would live up to their contractual obligations.

When Roger and his small company of five porters and a Zanzi-barian entered the hamlet, the three or four huts were already ashes and the residents had fled. The exception was a boy, almost a child, lying on the ground, his hands and feet tied to stakes, on whose back Lieutenant Francqui was easing his frustration with lashes from his chicote. Whippings were generally administered not by officers but by soldiers. But the lieutenant undoubtedly felt offended by the flight of the entire village and wanted revenge. Red with fury, sweating profusely, he gave a small snort with each lash. His expression did not change when he saw Roger and his group appear. He simply responded to Casement’s greeting with a nod, not interrupting the punishment. The boy must have lost consciousness some time earlier. His back and legs were a bloody mass, and Roger remembered one particular detail: a column of ants marching close to his body.

“You have no right to do that, Lieutenant Francqui,” he said in French. “That’s enough!”

The officer, a short man, lowered the chicote and turned to look at Roger’s long silhouette, bearded, unarmed, carrying a staff to test the ground and move aside debris during the march. A little dog scampered between his legs. Surprise made the lieutenant’s round face, with its trimmed mustache and small blinking eyes, pass from bright red to ashen and back to red again.

“What did you say?” he roared. Roger saw him let go of the chicote, move his right hand to his waist, and fumble with the cartridge belt where the butt of his revolver protruded. He realized instantly that in a fit of temper the officer might shoot him. He reacted quickly. Before the lieutenant could take out his weapon, he had him by the back of the neck and at the same time seized the revolver he had just grasped. Lieutenant Francqui tried to loosen the fingers at the nape of his neck. His eyes bulged like a toad’s.

The eight soldiers from the Force Publique, who had been watching the punishment as they smoked, had not moved, but Roger supposed that, disconcerted by what had happened, they had their hands on their rifles and were waiting for an order from their leader to take action.

“My name is Roger Casement, I work for the SEE, and you know me very well, Lieutenant Francqui, because we’ve played poker in Matadi,” he said, letting him go, bending down to pick up the revolver, and returning it to him with an amiable expression. “The way you’re whipping this young boy is a crime, no matter what offense he committed. As an officer of the Force Publique, you know that better than I, because you undoubtedly know the laws of the Congo Free State. If the boy dies because of this lashing, the crime will weigh on your conscience.”

“When I came to the Congo I took the precaution of leaving my conscience behind in my own country,” the officer said. Now he wore a mocking expression and seemed to be wondering whether Casement was a fool or a madman. His hysteria had dissipated. “Just as well you moved quickly, I was about to put a bullet in you. I would have found myself involved in a nice diplomatic dispute if I had killed an Englishman. In any case, I advise you not to interfere, as you’ve just done, with my colleagues in the Force Publique. They’re bad characters and things could go worse for you with them than with me.”

His anger had passed and now he seemed depressed. He purred that someone had warned them about his coming. Now he would have to go back to Matadi empty-handed. He said nothing when Roger ordered the troops to untie the boy and put him in a hammock, and having tied this between two sticks, he left with him for Boma. When they arrived two days later, in spite of his wounds and the blood he had lost, the boy was still alive. Roger left him at the dispensary. He went to court to register a complaint against Lieutenant Francqui for abuse of authority. In the following weeks he was called twice to make a deposition, and during the judge’s long, stupid interrogations, he realized his accusation would be filed away and the officer not even admonished.

By the time the judge finally ruled, throwing out the complaint for lack of evidence and because the victim refused to offer corroboration, Roger had resigned his post on the Expedition and was working once more for Henry Morton Stanley—whom the Kikongos of the region had now nicknamed “Bula Matadi” (Rock Breaker)—on the railroad being constructed parallel to the caravan route, from Boma and Matadi to Leopoldville–Stanley Pool. The boy who had been mistreated stayed on to work with Roger and from then on was his servant, assistant, and traveling companion through Africa. Since he never could say what his name was, Casement baptized him Charlie. He had been with him sixteen years.

Roger’s resignation from the Sanford expedition was due to an incident with one of the company directors. He didn’t regret it, for working with Stanley on the railroad, though it demanded an enormous physical effort, gave him back the illusion he’d had when he came to Africa. Opening the jungle and dynamiting mountains to lay down track for the railroad was the pioneering work he had dreamed of. The hours he spent outdoors, burning in the sun or drenched by downpours, directing the laborers and trail cutters, giving orders to the Zanzibarians, making certain the crews did their work well, packing down, leveling, reinforcing the ground where the crossties would be laid and clearing away dense branches, meant hours of concentration and the sense he was doing work that would be of equal benefit to Europeans and Africans, the colonizers and the colonized. Herbert Ward said to him one day: “When I met you, I thought you were only an adventurer. Now I know you’re a mystic.”

What Roger liked less was leaving the countryside for the villages to negotiate the assignment of porters and trail cutters to the railroad. The lack of laborers had become the primary problem as the Congo Free State grew. In spite of having signed the “treaties,” the chiefs, now that they understood what was involved, were reluctant to allow their people to leave to open roads, build stations and depositories, or harvest rubber. When Roger worked for the SEE, he succeeded in overcoming this resistance by having the company pay the workers a small salary, generally in kind, though it had no legal obligation to do so. Other companies began to follow suit, but even so it was not easy to hire laborers. The chiefs alleged they could not send away men who were indispensable for tending their crops and hunting and fishing for the food they ate. Often, when the recruiters approached, the able-bodied men hid in the underbrush. That was when the punitive expeditions began, the forced recruitments and the practice of locking women into so-called maisons d’otages (hostage houses) to make certain their husbands did not escape.

Both in Stanley’s expedition and in Henry Shelton Sanford’s, Roger was often responsible for negotiating with the indigenous communities for the surrender of native workers. Thanks to his facility in languages, he could make himself understood in Kikongo and Lingala—and later in Swahili as well—though always with the help of interpreters. Hearing him attempting to speak their language eased the mistrust of the natives. His gentle manner, patience, and respectful attitude facilitated dialogues, as did the gifts he brought: clothing, knives and other domestic objects, as well as the glass beads they liked so much. He usually returned to camp with a handful of men to clear the countryside and work as porters. He became famous as “a friend of the blacks,” a name that some of his colleagues judged with commiseration while others, especially some officers in the Force Publique, reacted to with contempt.

These visits to the tribes caused a disquiet in Roger that would increase with the years. At first he made them willingly, for they satisfied his curiosity to know something of the customs, languages, apparel, habits, foods, dances, songs, and religious practices of peoples who seemed mired in the depths of time, in whom a primitive innocence, healthy and direct, mixed with cruel customs, like sacrificing twins in certain tribes, or killing a number of servants—almost always slaves—to bury along with the chiefs, and the practice of cannibalism in some groups who, as a consequence, were feared and hated by other communities. He would leave negotiations with an ill-defined uneasiness, the sensation of playing dirty with those men from another time who, no matter how much he tried, would never be able to understand him fully, and consequently, in spite of the precautions he took to attenuate the abusiveness of the agreements, he felt guilty of having acted against his convictions, morality, and that “first principle,” which was what he called God.

Therefore, at the end of December 1888, before he had completed a year on Stanley’s chemin de fer, he resigned and went to work at the Baptist mission of Ngombe Lutete with the Bentleys, the married couple who ran it. He made the decision abruptly after a conversation that began at twilight and ended at the first light of dawn, in a house in the colonists’ district in Matadi, with an individual who was passing through. Theodore Horte was a former officer in the Royal Navy, which he had left to become a Baptist missionary in the Congo. The Baptists had been there since David Livingstone began to explore the African continent and preach evangelism. They had opened missions in Palabala, Banza Manteke, and Ngombe Lutete, and had just inaugurated another one, Arlington, in the vicinity of Stanley Pool. Theodore Horte, an inspector of these missions, spent his time traveling from one to another, giving help to the pastors and looking into opening new centers. That conversation produced in Roger an impression he would remember the rest of his life; during the days of convalescence from his third attack of malaria, in the middle of 1902, he could have reproduced it in minute detail.

No one imagined, hearing him speak, that Theodore Horte had been a career officer and, as a sailor, had participated in important military operations of the Royal Navy. He didn’t speak about his past or his private life. He was a distinguished-looking, well-mannered man of about fifty. On that tranquil night in Matadi, with no rain or clouds, a sky studded with stars that were reflected in the river, and the calm sound of the warm breeze ruffling their hair, Casement and Horte, lying in hammocks hung side by side, began an after-dinner conversation that Roger thought, at first, would last only for the few minutes after a meal and before sleep and would be another conventional, forgettable exchange. But shortly after their chat began, something made his heart beat faster than usual. He felt lulled by the sensitivity and warmth of Pastor Horte’s voice, inspired to speak about subjects he never shared with his colleagues at work—except, occasionally, Herbert Ward—and certainly not with his superiors. Preoccupations, anxieties, doubts that he hid as if they were something ominous. Did all of it make sense? Was the European adventure in Africa by any chance what was said, written, believed? Was it bringing civilization, progress, modernity by means of free trade and evangelization? Could those animals in the Force Publique be called civilizers when they stole everything they could on their punitive expeditions? How many of the colonizers—businessmen, soldiers, functionaries, adventurers—had a minimum of respect for the natives and considered them brothers or, at least, human beings? Five percent? One in a hundred? The truth, the truth was that in the years he had spent here he could count on one hand the number of Europeans who did not treat the blacks like soulless beasts whom they could deceive, exploit, whip, even kill, without the slightest remorse.

Theodore Horte listened in silence to the explosion of bitterness from young Roger. When he spoke, he did not seem surprised by what he had heard. On the contrary, he acknowledged that for years he, too, had been assailed by terrible doubts. Still, at least in theory, that business about “civilization” had a good deal of truth in it. Weren’t the natives’ living conditions atrocious? Didn’t their levels of hygiene, their superstitions, their ignorance of the most basic notions of health mean they died like flies? Wasn’t their life of mere survival tragic? Europe had a great deal to offer to bring them out of primitivism. So they would end certain barbaric customs, the sacrifice of children and the sick in so many communities, for example, the wars in which they killed one another, slavery, and cannibalism, still practiced in some places. And besides, wasn’t it good for them to know the true God and replace the idols they worshipped with the Christian God, the God of mercy, love, and justice? True, many evil people, perhaps the worst of Europe, had ended up here. Wasn’t there a solution? It was imperative that the good things from the Old Continent come here too. Not the greed of merchants with dirty souls, but science, law, education, inherent human rights, Christian ethics. It was too late to take a step backward, wasn’t it? It was pointless to ask whether colonization was good or bad, whether, if left to their fate, the Congolese would have been better off without Europeans. When things could not be turned back, it wasn’t worth wasting time wondering whether it would have been better if those things had not occurred. It was better to try to redirect them along the right path. It was always possible to straighten what had become twisted. Wasn’t that the greatest teaching of Christ?

When, at dawn, Roger asked him whether it was possible for a layman like him, who had never been very religious, to work in one of the missions that the Baptist Church had in the region of the Lower and Middle Congo, Theodore Horte gave a little laugh:

“It must be one of God’s jokes,” he exclaimed. “The Bentleys, at the Ngombe Lutete mission, need a lay assistant to give them a hand with bookkeeping. And now you ask me that question. Isn’t this something more than mere coincidence? One of those jokes God plays on us sometimes to remind us that He’s always there and we should never despair?”

Roger’s work from January to March of 1889, at the Ngombe Lutete mission, though short-lived, was intense, and it allowed him to leave behind the uncertainty in which he had lived for some time. He earned only ten pounds a month and with that he had to pay his room and board, but seeing William Holman Bentley and his wife work from morning to night with so much energy and conviction, and sharing with them life in the mission that was not only a religious center but a dispensary, a site for vaccinations, a school, a store for merchandise, and a place of recreation, counseling, and advice, made the colonial adventure seem less harsh, more reasonable, even civilizing. This feeling was encouraged by seeing how around this couple a small African community of converts to the reformed church had arisen who, in their attire and the songs the choir rehearsed every day for Sunday services, as well as in classes in literacy and Christian doctrine, seemed to be leaving tribal life behind and beginning a modern, Christian life.

His work was not limited to keeping the books of income and expenses for the mission. That took him little time. He did everything, from removing excess foliage and weeding the small cleared space around the mission—it was a daily struggle against vegetation determined to recover the clearing that had been snatched away—to going out to hunt down a leopard that was eating the fowl in the yard. He took care of transport by trail or by river in a small boat, fetching and carrying the sick, tools, and workers, and he watched over the operations of the mission store, where natives in the vicinity could sell and acquire goods. This was done principally by barter, but Belgian francs and pounds sterling also circulated. The Bentleys laughed at his ineptitude in business and his vocation for prodigality, for Roger thought all the prices were high and wanted to lower them, even though that would deprive the mission of the small profit margin that allowed it to supplement its meager budget.

In spite of the affection he came to feel for the Bentleys and the clear conscience he had working at their side, Roger knew from the beginning that his stay at the Ngombe Lutete mission would be temporary. The work was honorable and altruistic but made sense only if accompanied by the faith that animated Theodore Horte and the Bentleys and that he lacked, though he might mimic its gestures and manifestations, attending the commented readings of the Bible, the classes on doctrine, and the Sunday service. He wasn’t an atheist or an agnostic but something more uncertain, an indifferent man who did not deny the existence of God—the “first principle”—but was incapable of feeling comfortable in the bosom of a church, in common cause and joined with other believers, part of a common denominator. He tried to explain this to Theodore Horte during their long conversation in Matadi and felt clumsy and confused. The former naval officer calmed him: “I understand perfectly, Roger. God has His ways. He makes us uneasy, disturbs us, urges us to search. Until one day everything is illuminated and there He is. It will happen to you, you’ll see.”

In those three months, at least, it hadn’t happened to him. Now, in 1902, thirteen years later, he still felt religious uncertainty. The fevers had passed, he had lost a good deal of weight, and though at times his weakness made him dizzy, he had resumed his duties as consul in Boma. He went to visit the governor-general and other authorities. He returned to the games of chess and bridge. The rainy season was at its height and would last for many more months.

At the end of March 1889, when he finished his contract with Reverend William Holman Bentley and after five years away, he returned to Britain for the first time.

V

“Coming here has been one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life,” said Alice by way of greeting, pressing his hand. “I thought I’d never manage it. But here I am at last.”

Alice Stopford Green maintained the appearance of a cold, rational person, far removed from sentimentality, but Roger knew her well enough to understand that she was moved to the marrow of her bones. He noticed the very slight tremor in her voice she could not hide and the rapid quivering of her nose that appeared whenever something worried her. She was close to seventy but still had her youthful figure. Wrinkles had not erased the freshness of her freckled face or the luminosity of her bright, steely eyes. In them the light of intelligence always shone. With her usual sober elegance, she wore a light suit, thin blouse, and boots with high heels.

“What a pleasure, my dear Alice, what a pleasure,” Roger repeated, taking both her hands. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“I brought you books, sweets, and some clothes but the constables at the entrance took everything away.” Her expression showed impotence. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes,” Roger said eagerly. “You’ve done so much for me all this time. Is there no news yet?”

“The cabinet meets on Thursday,” she said. “I know from a good source that this matter is at the top of the agenda. We’re doing everything possible and even the impossible, Roger. The petition has close to fifty signatures, all of them important people. Scientists, artists, writers, politicians. John Devoy assures us that anytime now the telegram from the president of the United States ought to reach the British government. All our friends have mobilized to stop, well, I mean, to counteract the vile campaign in the press. You know about it, don’t you?”

“Vaguely,” said Roger with a look of displeasure. “We don’t get news from outside and the jailers have orders not to say a word to me. The sheriff speaks, but only to insult me. Do you think there’s still a possibility, Alice?”

“Of course I do,” she affirmed forcefully, but Roger thought it was a compassionate lie. “All my friends assure me the cabinet decides this unanimously. If a single minister opposes the execution, you’re saved. And it seems your former superior at the Foreign Office, Sir Edward Grey, is against it. Don’t lose hope, Roger.”

This time the sheriff of Pentonville Prison was not in the visitors’ room. Only a very young, discreet guard who turned his back on them and looked at the corridor through the grating in the door, pretending disinterest in their conversation. If all the jailers at Pentonville were this considerate, life here would be much more bearable, he thought, and realized he still hadn’t asked Alice about events in Dublin.

“I know that when the Easter Week Rising broke out, Scotland Yard went to search your house on Grosvenor Road,” he said. “Poor Alice, did they make things hard for you?”

“Not too bad, Roger. They took a good number of papers. Personal letters, manuscripts. I hope they return them. I don’t think the papers will do them any good,” she said with a sigh, distressed. “Compared to what they’ve suffered in Ireland, what happened to me was nothing.”

Would the harsh repression continue? Roger made an effort not to think about the shootings, the dead, the aftermath of that tragic week. But Alice must have read in his eyes his curiosity to know about it.

“The executions have stopped, apparently,” she murmured, looking quickly at the guard’s back. “We estimate there are thirty-five hundred prisoners. Most have been brought here and are distributed in prisons all across England. We’ve found eighty women among them. Several associations are helping us. Many English lawyers have offered to take their cases, free of charge.”

Questions pounded in Roger’s head. How many of his friends were among the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned? But he controlled himself. Why find out things he could do nothing about that would only increase his bitterness?

“Do you know something, Alice? One of the reasons I’d like them to commute my sentence is because if they don’t, I’ll die without having learned Irish. If they do commute it, I’ll delve deep into it and I promise that in this very visitors’ room you and I will talk one day in Gaelic.”

She nodded with a little smile that was only half there.

“Gaelic is a difficult language,” she said, patting his arm. “You need a good deal of time and patience to learn it. You’ve had a very agitated life, my dear. But take comfort, few Irishmen have done as much for Ireland as you.”

“Thanks to you, my dear Alice. I owe you so much. Your friendship, hospitality, intelligence, and culture, those Tuesday get-togethers on Grosvenor Road, the extraordinary people, the pleasant atmosphere, are the best memories of my life. Now I can tell you this and thank you, dear friend. You taught me to love the past and the culture of Ireland. You were a generous teacher, who enriched my life enormously.”

He said what he had always felt but kept silent about because of shyness. Ever since he met her he had admired and loved the historian and writer Alice Stopford Green, whose books and studies about the historical past and legends and myths of Ireland, and on Gaelic, had contributed more than anything else to giving Roger the “Celtic pride” he boasted of so vigorously that at times it unleashed the ridicule even of his nationalist friends. He had met Alice eleven or twelve years earlier, when he asked for her help in the Congo Reform Association that he had founded with Edmund D. Morel. The public struggle of these new friends against Leopold II and his Machiavellian creation, the Congo Free State, had begun. The enthusiasm with which Alice Stopford Green devoted herself to their campaign to denounce the horrors in the Congo was decisive in having the many writers and politicians who were her friends join as well. Alice became Roger’s intellectual tutor and guide, and he, whenever he was in London, attended her weekly salon. These gatherings were attended by professors, journalists, poets, painters, musicians, and politicians who generally, like her, were critics of imperialism and colonialism and supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, and even radical nationalists who demanded total independence for Ireland. In the elegant, book-lined rooms of the house on Grosvenor Road, where Alice preserved the library of her late husband, the historian John Richard Green, Roger met W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Robert Cunninghame Graham, and many other writers.

“I have a question I almost asked Gee yesterday but didn’t have the courage. Did Conrad sign the petition? My lawyer and Gee haven’t mentioned his name.”

Alice shook her head.

“I wrote to him myself, asking for his signature,” she added with annoyance. “His reasons were confused. He’s always been slippery in political matters. Perhaps, as an assimilated British citizen, he doesn’t feel very secure. On the other hand, as a Pole, he hates Germany as much as Russia, both of which made his country disappear for so many centuries. In short, I don’t know. All your friends regret this very much. One can be a great writer and a coward in political matters. You know that better than anyone, Roger.”

Roger agreed. He regretted having asked the question. It would have been better not to know. The absence of that signature would torment him now just as it had tormented him to learn from his lawyer, Gavan Duffy, that Edmund D. Morel had not wanted to sign the petition for a commutation of his sentence either. His friend, his brother Bulldog! His companion in the struggle to assist the natives of the Congo also refused, claiming reasons of patriotic loyalty in wartime.

“Conrad’s not having signed won’t change things very much,” said the historian. “His political influence with the Asquith government is nil.”

“No, of course not,” Roger agreed.

Perhaps it had no importance in the success or failure of the petition, but for him, in his heart of hearts, it did. It would have done him good to recall, in the fits of despair that assailed him in his cell, that a person of Conrad’s prestige, admired by so many people—himself included—had helped at this critical moment and sent him, with his signature, a message of understanding and friendship.

“You met him a long time ago, didn’t you?” Alice asked, as if reading his thoughts.

“Twenty-six years ago exactly. In June 1890, in the Congo,” Roger specified. “He wasn’t a writer yet. Though, if I remember correctly, he told me he had begun a novel. No doubt it was Almayer’s Folly, the first one he published. He sent it to me, with a dedication. I still have the book somewhere. He hadn’t published anything yet. He was a sailor. You could barely understand his English, his Polish accent was so thick.”

“You still can’t understand him,” Alice said with a smile. “He still speaks English with that awful accent. As if he were ‘chewing pebbles,’ as Bernard Shaw says. But he writes it like an angel, whether we like him or not.”

Roger recalled the day in June 1890 when, perspiring in the humid heat and bothered by the bites of mosquitoes gorging on his foreigner’s skin, the young captain in the British merchant fleet arrived in Matadi. About thirty, with a high forehead, deep black beard, robust body, and deep-set eyes, his name was Konrad Korzeniowski, a Pole who had become a British citizen a few years earlier. Contracted by the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, he came to serve as captain of one of the small steamboats that carried goods and merchants back and forth between Leopoldville–Kinshasa and the distant cataracts of Stanley Falls in Kisangani. It was his first position as a ship’s captain, and he was filled with hopes and projects. He arrived in the Congo imbued with all the fantasies and myths used by Leopold II to create the image of a great humanitarian, a monarch determined to civilize Africa and free the Congolese from slavery, paganism, and other barbarities. In spite of his long experience sailing the seas of Asia and the Americas, his gift for languages, and his readings, there was something innocent and childlike in the Pole that charmed Roger immediately. The feeling was mutual, for from the day they met until three weeks later, when Korzeniowski left in the company of thirty porters on the caravan route to Leopoldville–Kinshasa, where he would take command of his ship Le roi des Belges, they saw each other morning, noon, and night.

They went for excursions in the environs of Matadi, as far as the now nonexistent Vivi, the first, transitory capital of the colony of which not even the rubble remained, and the mouth of the Mpozo River where, according to legend, the first rapids of Livingstone Falls and the Devil’s Cauldron had stopped the Portuguese Diego Cão four centuries earlier. On the Lafundi plain, Roger showed the young Pole the place where Henry Morton Stanley built his first house, which disappeared years later in a fire. But, above all, they talked a good deal about a great number of things, though principally about what was going on in the new Congo Free State where Konrad had just set foot and Roger had already spent six years. After a few days of their friendship, the Polish mariner had formed an idea of the place where he had come to work that was very different from the one he had brought with him. And, as he told Roger when they said goodbye at dawn on Saturday, June 28, 1890, en route to the Crystal Mountains, he had been “deflowered.” That is how he said it, in his gravelly, stony, sonorous accent: “You’ve deflowered me, Casement. About Leopold the Second, about the Congo Free State. Perhaps even about life.” And he repeated, dramatically: “Deflowered.”

They saw each other again several times, on Roger’s trips to London, and exchanged a few letters. Thirteen years after that first meeting, in June 1903, Roger, who was in England, received an invitation from Joseph Conrad (that was his name now, and he was already a prestigious writer) to spend a weekend at Pent Farm, his small country house in Hythe, Kent. The novelist led a frugal, solitary life there with his wife and son. Roger had a warm memory of those few days with the writer. Now he had silver in his hair and a thick beard, he had put on weight and acquired a certain intellectual arrogance in the way he expressed himself. But with Casement he was exceptionally effusive. When Roger congratulated him on his Congolese novel, Heart of Darkness, which he had just read and which had stirred him deeply because it was the most extraordinary description of the horrors people were living through in the Congo, Conrad cut him short with his hands.

“You should have appeared as co-author of that book, Casement,” he declared, patting him on the shoulder. “I never would have written it without your help. You removed the scales from my eyes. About Africa, about the Congo Free State. And about the human beast.”

Alone after dinner—the discreet Mrs. Conrad, a woman of very humble background, and the child had gone to bed—the writer, following the second glass of port, told Roger that for what he was doing to help the indigenous Congolese, he deserved to be called “the British Bartolomé de las Casas.” Roger blushed to the roots of his hair at such praise. How was it possible that someone who had so high an opinion of him, who had helped him and Edmund D. Morel so much in their campaign against Leopold II, had refused to sign a petition that asked only for his death sentence to be commuted? How could that compromise him with the government?

He recalled other occasional meetings with Conrad on his visits to London. They saw each other once at Roger’s club, the Wellington Club on Grosvenor Place, when he was with colleagues from the Foreign Office. The writer insisted that Roger stay to have a cognac with him after his companions had left. They recalled the sailor’s disastrous state of mind six months after he had passed through Matadi, when he returned. Roger was still working there, in charge of stores and transport. Konrad Korzeniowski was not even a shadow of the enthusiastic young man full of hope Roger had met half a year earlier. He looked years older, his nerves were frayed, and he had stomach problems because of parasites. Constant diarrhea caused him to lose many pounds. Embittered and pessimistic, he dreamed only of returning to London as soon as possible to put himself in the hands of real doctors.

“I can see the jungle has not been kind to you, Konrad. Don’t be alarmed. Malaria is like that, it takes time to leave even when the fever has disappeared.”

They talked after supper on the terrace of the small house that was Roger’s home and office. There was no moon or stars on this night in Matadi, but it wasn’t raining and the drone of the insects lulled them as they smoked and sipped from the glasses in their hands.

“The worst thing wasn’t the jungle, this unhealthy climate, the fevers that kept me semiconscious for close to two weeks,” the Pole complained. “Not even the ghastly dysentery that kept me shitting blood for five days in a row. The worst, the worst thing, Casement, was witnessing the horrible things that happen every day in this damn country. The things the black devils and the white devils do wherever you look.”

Konrad had made a voyage in Le roi des Belges, back and forth between Leopoldville–Kinshasa and Stanley Falls. Everything had gone wrong on that trip to Kisangani. He almost drowned when a canoe overturned and its inexpert rowers were trapped in a whirlpool near Kinshasa. Malaria kept him in bed in his small cabin with attacks of fever, without the strength to stand. There he learned that the previous captain of Le roi des Belges had been shot dead by arrows in a dispute with the natives of a village. Another official of the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, whom Konrad had gone to pick up in a remote settlement where he was harvesting ivory and rubber, died of an unknown disease in the course of the voyage. But the physical misfortunes that had plagued him were not what had so disturbed the Pole.

“It’s the moral corruption, the corruption of the soul that invades everything in this country,” he repeated in a hollow, gloomy voice, as if horrified by an apocalyptic vision.

“I tried to prepare you when we first met,” Roger reminded him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more explicit about what you were going to find on the Upper Congo.”

What had affected him so deeply? Discovering that very primitive practices like cannibalism were still current in some communities? That among the tribes and in commercial posts, slaves were still circulating who changed masters for a few francs? That the supposed liberators subjected the Congolese to even crueler forms of oppression and servitude? Had he been overwhelmed by the sight of the natives’ backs cut by the lash of the chicote? Did he see for the first time in his life a white flog a black until his body had been transformed into a crossword puzzle of wounds? He didn’t ask for details, but the captain of Le roi des Belges had undoubtedly been witness to terrible things when he waived his three-year contract in order to return to England as soon as possible. Further, he told Roger that in Leopoldville–Kinshasa, on his return from Stanley Falls, he’d had a violent argument with the director of the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, Camille Delcom-mune, whom he called a “savage in a vest and hat.” Now he wanted to return to civilization, which for him meant England.

“Have you read Heart of Darkness?” Roger asked Alice. “Do you think that vision of human beings is fair?”

“I assume it isn’t,” replied the historian. “We discussed it a great deal one Tuesday, after it came out. That novel is a parable according to which Africa turns the civilized Europeans who go there into barbarians. Your Congo report showed the opposite. That we Europeans were the ones who brought the worst barbarities there. Besides, you were in Africa for twenty years without becoming a savage. In fact, you came back more civilized than when you left here believing in the virtues of colonialism and the Empire.”

“Conrad said that in the Congo, the moral corruption of human beings rose to the surface, in whites as well as blacks. Heart of Darkness often kept me awake. I don’t think it describes the Congo, or reality, or history, but hell. The Congo is a pretext for expressing the awful vision that certain Catholics have of absolute evil.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the guard, turning toward them. “It’s been fifteen minutes and the visitor’s permit was for ten. You’ll have to say goodbye.”

Roger extended his hand to Alice, but to his surprise, she opened her arms. She gave him a warm embrace. “We’ll keep doing everything, everything, to save your life, Roger,” she whispered in his ear. He thought: For Alice to permit herself this much effusiveness, she must be convinced the petition will be rejected.

As he returned to his cell, he felt sad. Would he see Alice Stopford Green again? She represented so much to him! No one embodied as much as she did his passion for Ireland, the last of his passions, the most intense, the most recalcitrant, a passion that had consumed him and probably would send him to his death. “I don’t regret it,” he repeated to himself. The many centuries of oppression had caused so much pain in Ireland, so much injustice, that it was worth having sacrificed himself to this noble cause. No doubt he had failed. The plan so carefully structured to accelerate the emancipation of Ireland, associating her struggle with Germany and coordinating an offensive action by the Kaiser’s army and navy against Britain with the nationalist uprising, did not work out as he had foreseen. And he wasn’t able to stop the rebellion. And now Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, and so many others had been shot. Hundreds of comrades would rot in prison, God only knew for how many years. At least his example remained, as a weakened Joseph Plunkett said with fierce determination in Berlin. An example of devotion, of love, of sacrifice for a cause similar to the one that made him fight against Leopold II in the Congo, against Julio C. Arana and the Putumayo rubber planters in Amazonia. The cause of justice, of the helpless against the abuses of the powerful and the despotic. Would the campaign calling him a degenerate and a traitor succeed in erasing all the rest? In the end, what difference did it make? The important things were being decided on high; the God who at last, after so much time, was beginning to commiserate with him, had the final word.

As he lay on the cot on his back, his eyes closed, Joseph Conrad came to mind again. Would he have felt better if the former sailor had signed the petition? Maybe yes, maybe no. What had he meant that night, in his house in Kent, when he declared: “Before I went to the Congo, I was nothing more than a poor animal”? The phrase had made an impression on Roger, though he didn’t understand it entirely. What did it mean? Perhaps that what he did, failed to do, saw, and heard in those six months on the Middle and Upper Congo had wakened more profound and transcendent concerns regarding the human condition, original sin, evil, and history. Roger could understand that very well. The Congo had humanized him as well, if being human meant knowing the extremes that could be reached by greed, avarice, prejudice, and cruelty. That’s what moral corruption was: something that did not exist in animals but belonged exclusively to humans. The Congo had revealed to him that those things were part of life. It had opened his eyes, “deflowered” him as well as the Pole. Then he thought that he had arrived in Africa, at the age of twenty, still a virgin. Wasn’t it unjust that the press, as the sheriff of Pentonville Prison had told him, accused only him, among the vast human species, of being scum?

To combat the demoralization that was overwhelming him, he tried to imagine the pleasure it would be to take a long bath in a tub, with a great deal of water and soap, holding another naked body against his.

VI

He left Matadi on June 5, 1903, on the railroad constructed by Stanley and on which he had worked as a young man. For the two days of the slow journey to Leopoldville, he thought obsessively about an athletic feat of his youth: having been the first white to swim in the Nkissi, the largest river along the caravan route between Manyanga and Stanley Pool. He had already done this, with total unawareness, in smaller rivers along the Lower and Middle Congo, the Kwilo, the Lukungu, the Mpozo, and the Lunzadi, where there were also crocodiles, and nothing had happened to him. But the Nkissi was larger and more torrential, some one hundred yards wide, and filled with whirlpools due to the proximity of the great waterfall. The natives warned him it was imprudent, he could be swept away and smashed against the rocks. In fact, after a few strokes, Roger felt pulled by the legs and forced toward the middle of the river by contrary currents he could not get clear of in spite of energetic kicks and arm strokes. When he was losing his strength—he had already swallowed water—he managed to approach the bank by letting a wave knock him down. There he clutched at some rocks the best he could. When he climbed the slope he was covered with scrapes and his heart was pounding.

The trip he finally undertook lasted three months and ten days. Roger would think afterward that during this time his very being changed and he became another man, more lucid and realistic than he had been before, about the Congo, Africa, human beings, colonialism, Ireland, and life. But that experience also made him a man more given to unhappiness. For the rest of his life he would often say to himself, in moments of discouragement, that it would have been preferable not to have made the journey to the Middle and Upper Congo to verify how much truth lay in the accusations of abuses against the indigenous population in the rubber zones, made in London by certain churches and the journalist Edmund D. Morel, who seemed to have devoted his life to criticizing Leopold II and the Congo Free State.

On the first section of the trip between Matadi and Leopoldville he was surprised at how empty the countryside was; villages like Tumba, where he spent the night, and others scattered along the valleys of Nsele and Ndolo, which once teemed with people, were semideserted, with spectral old people shuffling their feet through clouds of dust or squatting against tree trunks, their eyes closed, as if dead or sleeping.

In those three months and ten days the impression of depopulation and the disappearance of people—the vanished villages and settlements where he had been, spent the night, done business fifteen or sixteen years earlier—was repeated over and over again, like a nightmare, in all the regions along the Congo River and its tributaries, or in the interior, in the stops Roger made to collect the testimony of missionaries, functionaries, officers and soldiers of the Force Publique, and natives whom he could question in Lingala, Kikongo, and Swahili, or in their languages making use of interpreters. Where were the people? Memory was not deceiving him. In his mind was the human effervescence, the flocks of children, women, tattooed men, with their filed incisors, necklaces of teeth, at times spears and masks, who had once surrounded him, examining and touching him. How was it possible that they had ceased to exist in so short a time? Some villages had been wiped out, in others the population had been reduced by half, by two-thirds, even by 90 percent. In some places he could confirm precise numbers. Lukolela, for example, in 1884, when Roger visited that populous community for the first time, had more than 5,000 inhabitants. Now there were just 352, most in a ruinous state because of age or disease, so that after his inspection, Roger concluded that only 82 survivors were still able to work. How had more than 4,000 inhabitants of Lukolela gone up in smoke?

The explanations of the government agents, the employees of the companies harvesting rubber, the officers of the Force Publique were always the same: the blacks died like flies because of sleeping sickness, smallpox, typhus, colds, pneumonia, malarial fevers, and other plagues that, because of poor nutrition, decimated those unable to resist disease. It was true, those epidemics were devastating. Sleeping sickness especially, carried by the tsetse fly, as had been discovered a few years earlier, attacked the blood and brain and produced in its victims a paralysis of the limbs and a lethargy from which they never emerged. But at this point in his journey, Roger continued asking the reason for the depopulation of the Congo, not searching for an answer but to confirm that the lies he heard were slogans everyone repeated. He knew the answer very well. The plague that had vaporized a good part of the Congolese from the Middle and Upper Congo was composed of greed, cruelty, rubber, an inhumane system, and the implacable exploitation of Africans by European colonists.

In Leopoldville he decided that to preserve his independence and not find himself coerced by the authorities, he would not use any form of official transport. With the authorization of the Foreign Office, he rented the Henry Reed and its crew from the American Baptist Missionary Union. The negotiation was slow, as was the gathering of wood and provisions for the journey. His stay in Leopoldville–Kinshasa had to be extended from June 6 to July 2, when they set sail upriver. The delay was a good idea. The freedom it gave him to travel in his own boat and drop anchor where he wished allowed him to verify things he never would have discovered if he had been subject to colonial institutions. And he never could have had so many dialogues with the Africans themselves, who dared approach him only when they determined he was not accompanied by any Belgian military or civil authority.

Leopoldville had grown a great deal since the last time Roger had been there six or seven years earlier. It was filled with houses, warehouses, missions, offices, courts, customs offices, inspectors, judges, accountants, officers and soldiers, shops, and markets. There were priests and ministers everywhere. Something in the growing city displeased him from the start. He was not received badly. From the governor to the police chief, including the judges and inspectors whom he went to greet, and the Protestant ministers and Catholic missionaries he visited, everyone met him with cordiality. They all were willing to give him the information he asked for, even though it might be, as he would confirm in the following weeks, evasive or shamelessly false. He felt that something hostile and oppressive filled the air and the profile the city was acquiring. On the other hand, Brazzaville, the neighboring capital of the French Congo that stood on the opposite bank of the river, which he visited a few times, made a much less oppressive, even a pleasant, impression on him, perhaps because of its open, well-designed streets and the good humor of its people. In it he did not detect the secretly ominous atmosphere of Leopoldville. In the almost four weeks he spent there, negotiating the rental of the Henry Reed, he obtained a good many facts but always with the feeling that no one was getting to the bottom of things, that even people with the best intentions were hiding something from him and from themselves, fearful of confronting a terrible, accusatory truth.

Herbert Ward would tell him afterward that it was all pure prejudice, that the things he saw and heard in subsequent weeks retroactively muddied his memory of Leopoldville. If not for this, his memory would retain more than negative images of his stay in the city founded by Henry Morton Stanley in 1881. One morning, following a long walk to take advantage of the cool part of the day, Roger went as far as the wharf. There, suddenly, his attention focused on two dark, half-naked boys unloading some launches and singing. They looked very young. They wore light loincloths not long enough to hide the shape of their buttocks. Both were slim, supple, and with the rhythmic movements they made unloading the bundles, they gave an impression of health, harmony, and beauty. He watched them for a long time. He regretted not having his camera with him. He would have liked to take their picture in order to recall afterward that not everything was ugly and sordid in the emerging city of Leopoldville.

When, on July 2, 1903, the Henry Reed weighed anchor and crossed the smooth, enormous, fluvial lagoon of Stanley Pool, Roger was moved: On the French shore, on a clear morning, the sand escarpments were visible, which reminded him of the white cliffs of Dover. Ibises with huge wings flew over the lagoon, elegant and proud, brilliant in the sun. The beauty of the landscape remained invariable for a good part of the day. From time to time the interpreters, porters, and trail cutters pointed excitedly at the tracks in the mud of elephants, hippopotamuses, buffalos, and antelope. John, his bulldog, happy on the journey, ran back and forth along the wharf, suddenly barking noisily. But when he reached Chumbiri, where they docked to pick up wood, John’s mood changed abruptly, the dog became enraged, and in a few seconds he managed to bite a pig, a goat, and the watchman of the garden the ministers of the Baptist Missionary Society had next to their small mission. Roger had to indemnify them with gifts.

After the second day, they began to pass small steamboats and launches loaded with baskets filled with rubber being carried down the Congo River to Leopoldville. This sight would accompany them for the rest of the excursion, as would, from time to time, glimpses through the branches along the banks of telegraph poles under construction and the roofs of villages from which the inhabitants fled into the jungle when they saw them approaching. From then on, when Roger wanted to question the natives in some settlement, he chose to send an interpreter first to explain to the residents that the British consul had come alone, with no Belgian official, to find out about the problems and needs they were facing.

On the third day, in Bolobo, where there was also a mission of the Baptist Missionary Society, he had the first foretaste of what awaited him. In the group of Baptist missionaries, the one who impressed him most for her energy, intelligence, and likability was Dr. Lily de Hailes. Tall, tireless, ascetic, talkative, she had been in the Congo for fourteen years, spoke several indigenous languages, and directed the hospital for natives with both dedication and efficiency. The site was crowded. As they walked past the hammocks, cots, and mats where the patients were lying, Roger asked intentionally why there were so many wounds on the buttocks, legs, and back. Dr. de Hailes looked at him indulgently.

“They’re victims of a plague called chicote, Mr. Consul. A beast more bloodthirsty than the lion and the cobra. Aren’t there chicotes in Boma and Matadi?”

“They’re not applied as liberally as here.”

As a young woman, Dr. de Hailes must have had a great head of red hair, but as the years passed it had turned gray, and she now had only a few flaming locks that escaped the kerchief she used to cover her head. The sun had darkened her bony face, her neck and arms, but her greenish eyes were still young and lively, with an indomitable faith sparkling in them.

“And if you want to know why there are so many Congolese with bandages on their hands and private parts, I can explain that to you as well,” Lily de Hailes added defiantly. “Because the soldiers of the Force Publique cut off their hands and penises or crush them with machetes. Don’t forget to put that in your report. They’re things that aren’t usually said in Europe when they talk about the Congo.”

That afternoon, after spending several hours talking through interpreters with the wounded and sick in the Bolobo hospital, Roger could not eat supper. He felt guilty toward the ministers in the mission, among them Dr. de Hailes, who had roasted a chicken in his honor. He excused himself, saying he didn’t feel well. He was certain that if he tasted even a single mouthful, he would vomit on his hosts.

“If what you have seen has upset you, perhaps it isn’t prudent for you to interview Captain Massard,” advised the head of the mission. “Listening to him is a good experience, I would say, for strong stomachs.”

“That’s why I’ve come to the Middle Congo, my friends.”

Captain Pierre Massard, of the Force Publique, was not stationed in Bolobo but in Mbongo, where there was a garrison and training camp for the Africans who would be soldiers in the force charged with maintaining order and security. He was on an inspection tour and had set up a small campaign tent near the mission. The ministers invited him to speak with the consul, warning Roger that the officer was famous for his irascible character. The natives had nicknamed him “Malu Malu,” and one of the sinister deeds attributed to him was having killed three intractable Africans, whom he had placed in a row, with a single shot. It wasn’t prudent to provoke him, because he was capable of anything.

He was a powerful, rather short man, with a square face, hair cut very close, nicotine-stained teeth, and an icy little smile. He had small, somewhat slanted eyes, and a high-pitched, almost feminine voice. The ministers had prepared a table with cassava pastries and mango juice. They didn’t drink alcohol but had no objection to Casement bringing a bottle of brandy and another of claret from the Henry Reed. The captain ceremoniously shook hands with everyone and greeted Roger by making a baroque bow, calling him “son excellence, Monsieur le Consul.” They toasted, drank, and lit cigarettes.

“If you’ll permit me, Captain Massard, I’d like to ask you a question,” said Roger.

“How well you speak French, Monsieur le Consul. Where did you learn it?”

“I began to study it when I was young, in Britain. But above all here, in the Congo, where I’ve been for many years. I imagine I speak it with a Belgian accent.”

“Ask me all the questions you wish,” said Massard, taking another drink. “Your brandy is excellent, by the way.”

The four Baptist ministers were there, still and silent, as if petrified. They were North Americans, two young men and two old. Dr. de Hailes had gone to the hospital. Night began to fall and the buzz of nocturnal insects could already be heard. To chase away mosquitoes, they had lit a fire that crackled gently and smoked at times.

“I’m going to tell you with utter frankness, Captain Massard,” said Roger, not raising his voice, very slowly. “I think the crushed hands and cut-off penises that I’ve seen in the Bolobo hospital are unacceptable savagery.”

“They are, of course they are,” the officer admitted immediately, with an expression of disgust. “And something worse than that, Monsieur le Consul: a waste. Those mutilated men won’t be able to work any more, or they’ll do it badly, and their yield will be minimal. With the lack of labor we have here, it’s a real crime. Bring me the soldiers who cut off those hands and penises and I’ll thrash their backs until there’s no blood left in their veins.”

He sighed, overwhelmed by the degrees of imbecility the world suffered from. He took another sip of brandy and inhaled his cigarette deeply.

“Do the laws or regulations permit the mutilation of indigenous people?” asked Roger.

Captain Massard guffawed, and when he laughed his square face rounded and comic dimples appeared.

“They prohibit it categorically,” he declared, waving away something in the air. “Make those two-legged animals understand what laws and regulations are. Don’t you know them? If you’ve spent so many years in the Congo, you must. It’s easier to make a hyena or a tick understand things than a Congolese.”

He laughed again, but then immediately became enraged. Now his expression was hard and his slanted little eyes had almost disappeared beneath swollen lids.

“I’m going to explain to you what happens, and then you’ll understand,” he added, sighing, fatigued in advance at having to explain things as obvious as the world being round. “Everything stems from a very simple concern,” he said, waving away his winged enemy with greater fury. “The Force Publique cannot waste ammunition. We cannot permit the soldiers to squander the bullets we distribute killing monkeys, snakes, and other revolting animals they like to stick in their bellies, sometimes raw. During training they are taught that ammunition can only be used in self-defense, when officers order them to. But it’s hard for these blacks to follow orders, no matter how many chicote lashes they receive. That’s why the decree was issued. Do you understand, Monsieur le Consul?”

“No, I don’t understand, Captain,” said Roger. “What decree is that?”

“That each time they fire they cut off the hand or penis of the man they shot,” the captain explained. “To confirm that bullets are not being wasted on hunting. A sensible way to avoid wasting ammunition, isn’t that so?”

He sighed again and took another drink of brandy. He spat into the emptiness.

“But no, that isn’t what happened,” the captain complained immediately, enraged again. “Because these shits found a way to get around the decree. Can you guess how?”

“I have no idea,” said Roger.

“Very simple. By cutting off the hands and penises of the living to make us think they’ve fired at people when they’ve shot monkeys, snakes, and the other filth they eat. Do you understand now why all those poor devils are there in the hospital without hands and pricks?”

He fell silent for a long while and drank the rest of the brandy in his glass. He seemed to become sad and even pouted.

“We do what we can, Monsieur le Consul,” Captain Massard added sorrowfully. “It’s not at all easy, I assure you. Because in addition to being stupid, the savages are born falsifiers. They lie, deceive, lack feelings and principles. Not even fear opens their minds. I assure you that the punishments in the Force Publique for those who cut off the hands and pricks of the living to deceive and continue to hunt with ammunition given to them by the state are very severe. Visit our posts and see for yourself, Monsieur le Consul.”

The conversation with Captain Massard lasted as long as the fire throwing off sparks at their feet, two hours at least. The officer and the consul had drunk the brandy and the claret. They were somewhat tipsy, but Roger was still lucid. Months or years later he could have recounted in detail the brusque remarks and confessions he heard and the way Captain Pierre Massard’s square face became congested with alcohol. In the following weeks he would have many other conversations with officers of the Force Publique, Belgian, Italian, French, and German, and would hear terrible things from their mouths, but what would always stand out in his memory as the most thought-provoking, a symbol of Congolese reality, was the chat that night in Bolobo with Captain Massard. After a certain point the officer became sentimental. He confessed to Roger how much he missed his wife. He hadn’t seen her for two years and received few letters from her. Perhaps she had stopped loving him. Perhaps she had taken a lover. It wasn’t surprising. It happened to many officers and functionaries who, to serve Belgium and His Majesty the king, buried themselves in this hell, to contract diseases, be bitten by snakes, live without the most basic comforts. And for what? To earn miserable salaries that barely allowed them to save. And afterward, in Belgium, would anyone thank them for their sacrifice? On the contrary, in the mother country there was an unyielding prejudice against “colonials.” The officers and functionaries who returned from the colony were discriminated against, kept at a distance, as if, after spending so much time with savages, they had become savages too.

When Captain Pierre Massard drifted to the topic of sex, Roger felt an anticipatory disgust and tried to say good night. But by now the officer was drunk, and in order not to offend him or have an altercation with him, he had to stay. In the meantime, enduring his nausea, he listened to him, telling himself he wasn’t in Bolobo to dispense justice but to investigate and accumulate information. The more exact and complete his report, the more effective his contribution to the struggle against the institutionalized evil the Congo had become. Captain Massard felt compassion for those young lieutenants or noncommissioned officers from the Belgian army who came filled with illusions to teach these poor devils to be soldiers. And what about their sex lives? They had to leave behind in Europe their fiancées, wives, and mistresses. And what about here? Not even prostitutes worthy of the name in these godforsaken wastelands. Only some disgusting black women covered with insects, and you had to be very drunk to fuck them, running the risk of catching crabs, the clap, or a chancre. It was hard for him, for example. He couldn’t perform, nom de Dieu! It had never happened to him in Europe. Him, Pierre Massard, impotent in bed! It wasn’t even a good idea to get a blow job, because with those teeth so many black women were in the habit of filing down, they could give you a sudden bite and castrate you.

He grabbed his fly and began to laugh, making an obscene face. Taking advantage of the fact that Massard was still having a good time, Roger stood.

“I must go, Captain. I have to leave very early tomorrow and I’d like to rest a little.”

The captain shook his hand in a mechanical way but continued speaking, not getting up from his seat, his voice faint and his eyes glassy. When Roger walked away, he heard him at his back, muttering that choosing a military career had been the great mistake of his life, and for the rest of his life he would keep paying for it.

He set sail the next morning in the Henry Reed on his way to Lukolela. He spent three days there, speaking day and night with all kinds of people: functionaries, colonists, overseers, natives. Then he advanced to Ikoko, where he entered Lake Mantumba. Near it he found that enormous tract of land called the Domaine de la Couronne. Around it the principal private rubber companies operated, the Lulonga Company, the ABIR Company, and the Société Anver-soise du Commerce au Congo, which had vast concessions throughout the region. He visited dozens of villages, some on the shores of the immense lake and others in the interior. To reach these it was necessary to shift to small canoes powered by oars or poles and walk for hours in dense undergrowth that was dark and damp, through which the natives cut a path with machetes and where he was often obliged to wade in water up to his waist over flooded terrain and pestilential quagmires amid clouds of mosquitoes and the silent shapes of bats. For all these weeks he resisted fatigue, natural difficulties, and inclement weather without flagging, in a feverish spiritual state, as if bewitched, because each day, each hour, he seemed to be sinking into deeper layers of suffering and evil. Would the hell Dante described in his Commedia be like this? He hadn’t read the book and swore he would as soon as he could get his hands on a copy.

The indigenous people, who at the beginning of the trip ran away as soon as they saw the Henry Reed approach, believing the steamboat carried soldiers, soon began to come out to meet it and send emissaries so that he would visit their villages. Word had spread among the natives that the British consul was traveling the region to listen to their complaints and requests, and then they went to him with testimonies and stories, each worse than the other. They believed he had the power to straighten everything that was crooked in the Congo. He explained the situation to them in vain. He had no power at all. He would report on these injustices and crimes and Great Britain and her allies would demand that the Belgian government put an end to the abuses and punish the torturers and criminals. That was all he could do. Did they understand? He wasn’t even sure they were listening. They felt so pressed to speak, to recount the things that had happened to them, that they paid him no attention. They spoke in a rush, choking with despair and rage. The interpreters had to interrupt them, pleading with them to speak more slowly so they could do their job.

Roger listened, taking notes. Then, for nights on end he wrote on his cards and in his notebooks what he had heard so none of it would be lost. He barely ate. He was so tormented by the fear that all those papers he had scrawled on might be lost that he didn’t know where to hide them or what precautions to take. He chose to carry them with him, on the shoulders of a porter who had been ordered never to leave his side.

He hardly slept, and when fatigue overwhelmed him, nightmares attacked, moving him from fear to stunned bewilderment, from satanic visions to a state of desolation and sadness in which everything lost its meaning and reason for being: his family, friends, ideas, country, feelings, and work. At those moments he longed more than ever for Herbert Ward and his infectious enthusiasm for all of life’s manifestations, an optimistic joy that nothing and no one could crush.

Afterward, when the journey ended and he wrote his report and left the Congo, and his twenty years in Africa were only a memory, Roger often said to himself that if there was a single word at the root of all the horrible things happening here, that word was greed. Greed for the black gold found in abundance in the Congolese jungles, to the misfortune of their people. That wealth was the curse that had befallen those unfortunates, and if things continued in the same way, it would cause them to disappear from the face of the earth. He reached this conclusion during those three months and ten days: if the rubber was not consumed first, the Congolese would be the ones consumed by a system that was annihilating them by the hundreds of thousands.

During those weeks, after he entered the waters of Lake Mantumba, memories would be mixed like shuffled cards. If he had not kept a detailed record of dates, places, testimonies, and observations in his notebooks, all of it would be scrambled and out of order in his memory. He would close his eyes and in a dizzying whirlwind those ebony bodies would appear and reappear with reddish scars like snakes slicing across their backs, buttocks, and legs, the stumps of children and old people whose arms had been cut off, the emaciated, cadaverous faces that seemed to have had the life, fat, and muscles drained from them, leaving only the skin, the skull, and the fixed expression or grimace expressing, more than pain, an infinite stupefaction at everything they were suffering. And it was always the same, the same acts repeated over and over again in all the villages and settlements where Roger set foot with his notebooks, pencils, and camera.

The point of departure was simple and clear. Certain precise obligations had been fixed for each village: delivering weekly or semimonthly quotas of food—cassava, fowl, antelope meat, wild pigs, goats, or ducks—to feed the garrison of the Force Publique and the laborers who opened roads, installed telegraph poles, and constructed piers and storehouses. Moreover, the village had to deliver a fixed quantity of rubber harvested in baskets woven of vines by the natives themselves. The punishments for not fulfilling these obligations varied. For delivering less than the established quantities of foodstuffs or rubber, the penalty was whipping with the chicote, never less than twenty and sometimes as many as fifty or one hundred lashes. Many of those punished bled to death. The indigenous people who fled—very few of them—sacrificed their families because their wives were kept as hostages in the maisons d’otages that the Force Publique had in all its garrisons. There, the wives of fugitives were whipped, condemned to the torments of hunger and thirst, and at times subjected to tortures as evil-minded as being forced to eat their own or their guards’ excrement.

Not even the orders issued by the colonial power—both private companies and the king’s holdings—were respected. Everywhere the system was violated and made worse by the soldiers and officers charged with making it function, because in each village the military men and government agents increased the quotas in order to keep for themselves a part of the food and some baskets of rubber, reselling them in small transactions.

In all the villages Roger visited, the complaints of the chiefs were identical: if all the men dedicated themselves to harvesting rubber, how could they go out to hunt and cultivate cassava and other foods to feed the authorities, the bosses, the guards, and the laborers? Besides, the rubber trees were giving out, which obliged the harvesters to go deeper and deeper into unknown, inhospitable regions where many had been attacked by leopards, lions, and snakes. It wasn’t possible to satisfy all these demands no matter how they tried.

On September 1, 1903, Roger turned thirty-nine years old. They were navigating the Lopori River. The night before they had left the settlement of Isi Isulo in the hills surrounding Bongandanga Mountain. This birthday would remain permanently etched in his memory, as if on that day God or perhaps the devil wanted to prove there were no limits in matters of human cruelty, that it was always possible to go further in devising ways to inflict torment on another human being.

The day dawned cloudy with the threat of a storm, but the rain didn’t come and all morning the atmosphere was charged with electricity. Roger was about to have breakfast when Father Hutot, a Trappist monk from the mission the order had in the area of Coquilhatville, came to the improvised dock where the Henry Reed was anchored. He was tall and thin, like an El Greco figure, with a long gray beard and eyes where something stirred that could have been anger, fright, astonishment, or all three at once.

“I know what you’re doing in these lands, Consul,” he said, extending a skeletal hand to Roger. He spoke French rushed by an imperative urgency. “I beg you to accompany me to the village of Walla. It’s only an hour or an hour and a half from here. You have to see it with your own eyes.”

He spoke as if he had the fever and tremors of malaria.

“Fine, mon père,” Roger agreed. “But first sit down, let’s have coffee and something to eat.”

While they ate, Father Hutot explained to the consul that the Trappists at the mission in Coquilhatville had permission from the order to break the strict cloistered regime that rules elsewhere in order to give aid to the natives, “who need it so much in this land where Beelzebub seems to be winning the struggle with the Lord.”

Not only the monk’s voice trembled but also his eyes, his hands, his spirit. He blinked unceasingly, wore a coarse tunic that was stained and wet, and on his feet, covered with mud and scratches, were strapped sandals. Father Hutot had been in the Congo for some ten years. For the past eight he had traveled periodically to the villages in the region, climbed to the top of Bongandanga, and seen at close range a leopard that, instead of jumping him, moved off the path, waving its tail. He spoke indigenous languages and had gained the confidence of the natives, especially those from Walla, “those martyrs.”

They started out on a narrow trail between the branches of tall trees, intercepted from time to time by narrow streams. The song of invisible birds could be heard, and at times a flock of parrots flew screeching over their heads. Roger noticed that the monk walked through the jungle with assurance, not tripping, as if he had long experience of these treks through the undergrowth. Father Hutot explained to him what had happened in Walla. Since the village, already very reduced, could not deliver in full the last quota of food, rubber, and wood, or give over the number of laborers the authorities demanded, a detachment of thirty soldiers from the Force Publique, under the command of Lieutenant Tanville, came from the garrison at Coquilhatville. When they saw them approach, the entire village fled to the forest. But the interpreters followed and assured them they could return. Nothing would happen to them, Lieutenant Tanville wanted only to explain the new directives and negotiate with the village. The chief ordered them to return. As soon as they did, the soldiers fell on them. Men and women were tied to the trees and whipped. A pregnant woman who tried to move away to urinate was shot to death by a soldier, who believed she was fleeing. Another ten women were taken to the maison d’otages in Coquilhatville as hostages. Lieutenant Tanville gave Walla a week to fulfill its quota or those ten women would be shot and the village burned.

When Father Hutot arrived in Walla a few days later, he encountered a hideous sight. In order to fulfill the quotas they owed, the families in the village had sold their sons and daughters, and two of the men their wives, to traveling merchants who practiced the slave trade behind the backs of the authorities. The Trappist believed the children and women sold numbered at least eight, but perhaps there were more. The natives were terrified. They had gone to buy rubber and food to satisfy the debt but weren’t sure the money from the sale would be enough.

“Can you believe things like that happen in this world, Consul?”

“Yes, mon père. Now I believe everything evil and terrible that people tell me. If I’ve learned anything in the Congo it’s that there’s no bloodthirsty animal worse than the human being.”

I didn’t see anyone cry in Walla, Roger would think afterward. And he didn’t hear anyone complain. The village seemed inhabited by automatons, ghostly beings who walked back and forth among the thirty or so huts made of wooden sticks with conical roofs of palm leaves, disoriented, not knowing where to go, having forgotten who they were, where they were, as if a curse had fallen on the village, transforming its inhabitants into phantoms. But phantoms with backs and buttocks covered in fresh scars, some with traces of blood as if the wounds were still open.

With the help of Father Hutot, who spoke the tribe’s language fluently, Roger carried out his work. He questioned each and every one of the villagers, listening to them repeat what he had already heard and would often hear afterward. Here too, in Walla, he was surprised that none of those poor creatures complained about the main thing: With what right had the foreigners come to invade, exploit, and mistreat them? They took into consideration only the immediate problem: the quotas. They were excessive, there was no human force that could gather so much rubber, so much food, give up so many laborers. They didn’t even complain about the beatings and the hostages. They asked only that their quotas be lowered a little so they could fulfill them and in this way keep the authorities happy with the people of Walla.

Roger spent the night in the village. The following day, his notebooks filled with notes and testimonies, he said goodbye to Father Hutot. He had decided to change his planned trajectory. He returned to Lake Mantumba, boarded the Henry Reed, and headed for Coquilhatville. It was a large village, with irregular dirt streets, dwellings scattered among groves of palm trees, and small cultivated fields. As soon as he disembarked, he went to the garrison of the Force Publique, a vast space of rough buildings and a stockade of yellow slats.

Lieutenant Tanville had gone out on an assignment, but Roger was received by Captain Marcel Junieux, the head of the garrison and the man responsible for all the stations and posts of the Force Publique in the region. He was in his forties, tall, slim, muscular, his skin bronzed by the sun and his hair, already gray, cut close to the scalp. He had a little medal of the Virgin hanging around his neck and the tattoo of a small animal on his forearm. He led Roger to a crude office that had some banners and a photograph of Leopold II in parade uniform on the walls. He offered him a cup of coffee and had him sit at a small worktable covered with notebooks, regulations, maps, and pencils, on a very fragile chair that seemed about to collapse at each movement Roger made. The captain had spent his childhood in England, where his father had a business, and spoke good English. He was a career officer who had volunteered to come to the Congo five years earlier “to serve my country, Consul.” He said this with acid irony.

He was about to be promoted and return to the mother country. He listened to Roger without once interrupting him, very serious and, it seemed, deeply focused on what he was hearing. His grave, impenetrable expression did not alter at any detail. Roger was precise and meticulous. He made very clear what he had been told and what he had seen with his own eyes: the scarred backs and buttocks, the testimonies of those who had sold their children to fulfill the quotas they hadn’t been able to satisfy. He explained that His Majesty’s government would be informed of these horrors, but he also believed it was his duty, in the name of the government he represented, to lodge his protest against the Force Publique, which was responsible for abuses as outrageous as those committed in Walla. He was an eyewitness to the fact that the village had been turned into a small hell. When he finished speaking, Captain Junieux’s face did not change. He waited some time, in silence. Finally, moving his head slightly, he said quietly,

“As you no doubt know, Consul, we, I mean the Force Publique, do not issue the laws. We simply see that they are carried out.”

His gaze was clear and direct, with no trace of discomfort or irritation.

“I know the laws and regulations that govern the Congo Free State, Captain. Nothing in them authorizes you to mutilate the natives, to whip them until they bleed to death, to keep the women hostage so their husbands don’t run away, to extort the villages to the extreme that mothers have to sell their children to deliver the quotas of food and rubber you demand of them.”

“We?” Captain Junieux exaggerated his surprise. He shook his head and as he moved, the little tattooed animal moved. “We demand nothing of anyone. We receive orders and carry them out, that’s all. The Force Publique does not set the quotas, Mr. Casement. The political authorities and the directors of the concessionaire companies set them. We are the executors of a policy in which we have not intervened in the slightest. No one ever asked for our opinion. If they had, perhaps things would go better.”

He stopped speaking and seemed distracted for a moment. Through the large windows with metal screens, Roger saw a rectangular treeless clearing where a formation of African soldiers were marching, wearing drill trousers, theirs torsos and feet bare. They changed direction at the command of a sergeant major wearing boots, a uniform shirt, and a kepi.

“I’ll investigate. If Lieutenant Tanville has committed or facilitated extortion, he will be punished,” said the captain. “The soldiers, too, of course, if they were excessive in the use of the chicote. This is all I can promise you. The rest is beyond my authority; it is a legal question. Changing this system is not the task of the military but of judges and politicians. Of the Supreme Government. You know that too, I imagine.”

Suddenly a slight inflection of discouragement appeared in his voice.

“There’s nothing I’d like better than for the system to change. I’m disgusted too by what happens here. What we’re obliged to do offends my principles.” He touched the medal around his neck. “My faith. I’m a very Catholic man. Over there, in Europe, I always tried to act according to my beliefs. That isn’t possible here in the Congo, Consul. That’s the sad truth. That’s why I’m very happy to return to Belgium. I won’t set foot in Africa again, I assure you.”

Captain Junieux got up from his table and walked to one of the windows. Turning his back on the consul, he was silent for a long time, observing the recruits who never learned the rhythm of the march, who tripped, whose lines in their formation were crooked.

“If that’s the case, you could do something to put an end to these crimes,” Roger murmured. “This isn’t why we Europeans came to Africa.”

“Ah, isn’t it?” Captain Junieux turned to look at him and the consul saw that the officer had paled somewhat. “What have we come for, then? I know: to bring civilization, Christianity, and free commerce. Do you still believe that, Mr. Casement?”

“Not anymore,” Roger replied immediately. “Though I did believe it before. With all my heart. I believed it for many years, with all the ingenuousness of the idealistic boy I once was. That Europe came to Africa to save lives and souls, to civilize the savages. Now I know I was wrong.”

Captain Junieux’s expression changed, and it seemed to Roger that suddenly the officer’s face had traded the hieratic mask for a more human one that even looked at him with the pitying sympathy idiots deserve.

“I’m trying to redeem that sin of my youth, Captain. That’s why I’ve come to Coquilhatville. That’s why I’m documenting, as fully as I can, the abuses committed here in the name of so-called civilization.”

“I wish you success, Consul.” Captain Junieux mocked him with a smile. “But if you’ll allow me to speak frankly, I’m afraid you won’t have any. There’s no human power that can change this system. It’s too late for that.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to visit the jail and the maison d’otages where you have the women brought here from Walla,” said Roger, abruptly changing the topic.

“You can visit anything you like,” the officer agreed. “Make yourself at home. But permit me to remind you again of what I said. We aren’t the ones who invented the Congo Free State. We only make it function. We’re victims too.”

The jail was a hut of wood and brick, with no windows and a single entrance, guarded by two native soldiers with shotguns. There were a dozen half-naked men, some very old, lying on the ground. What he found most shocking wasn’t the abject or inexpressive faces of those silent skeletons whose eyes followed him back and forth as he walked around the hut, but the stench of urine and excrement.

“We’ve tried to teach them to take care of their business in those buckets.” He read the captain’s mind as he pointed at a receptacle. “But they’re not used to that. They prefer the ground. They don’t care about the stink. It’s their problem. Maybe they don’t smell it.”

The maison d’otages was smaller but the spectacle was more dramatic because it was so crowded Roger could barely circulate among those packed-together, half-naked bodies. The space was so tight that many women could not sit or lie down but had to remain standing.

“This is exceptional,” said Captain Junieux, gesturing. “There are never this many. Tonight, so they can sleep, we’ll move half of them to one of the soldiers’ barracks.”

Here, too, the stink of urine and excrement was compelling. Some women were very young, almost girls. They all had the same gaze—lost, somnambulistic, beyond life—which Roger would see in so many Congolese women during this journey. One of the hostages had a newborn in her arms, so still it seemed dead.

“What criterion do you follow for letting them go?” the consul asked.

“I don’t decide that, sir, a magistrate does. There are three in Coquilhatville. There is only one criterion: when the husbands turn in the quotas they’re supposed to, they can take their wives away.”

“And if they don’t?”

The captain shrugged.

“Some manage to escape,” he said, not looking at him and lowering his voice. “The soldiers take others and make them their wives. Those are the luckiest. Some go mad and kill themselves. Others die of sorrow, rage, and hunger. As you’ve seen, they have almost nothing to eat. That isn’t our fault either. I don’t receive enough supplies to feed the soldiers. Even less for the prisoners. Sometimes we take up small collections among the officers to improve the rations. That’s how things are. I’m the first to regret it isn’t different. If you succeed in improving this, the Force Publique will thank you.”

Roger went to visit the three Belgian magistrates in Coquilhatville, but only one received him. The other two invented pretexts for avoiding him. But Maître Duval, a plump, self-satisfied man in his fifties who, in spite of the tropical heat, wore a vest, false shirt cuffs, and a frock coat with a watch chain, led him to his stripped-down office and offered him a cup of tea. He listened politely, sweating profusely. He wiped his face from time to time with a handkerchief that was already wet. At times he made disapproving movements of his head and wore an afflicted expression because of what the consul was saying. When Roger finished, he asked him to detail everything in writing. In that way he would be able to file with the court of which he formed part a requisitory to open a formal investigation into these lamentable episodes. Though perhaps, Maître Duval rectified, with a reflective finger on his chin, it would be preferable if the consul would file that report with the Superior Court, established now in Leopoldville. Because it was a higher, more influential court, it could act more efficiently throughout the colony. Not only remedying this state of things, but at the same time indemnifying with economic compensation the families of the victims and the victims themselves. Roger told him he would. He said goodbye, convinced that Maître Duval would not lift a finger and neither would the Superior Court in Leopoldville. But even so, he would file the brief.

At dusk, when he was about to leave, a native came to tell him the monks at the Trappist mission wanted to see him. There he saw Father Hutot again. The monks—there were half a dozen—wanted to ask him to secretly carry away on his steamboat a handful of fugitives they had been hiding in the monastery for some days. They were all from the village of Bonginda, up the Congo River, where, on account of not fulfilling their quotas of rubber, the Force Publique had carried out a punishing action as severe as the one in Walla.

The Trappist mission in Coquilhatville was a large two-story house of clay, stones, and wood, which looked like a small fort from the outside. The windows were closed up. The abbot, Dom Jesualdo, of Portuguese origin, was very old, as were another two monks, emaciated and almost lost in their white tunics, with black scapulars and crude leather belts. Only the oldest were monks, the others were lay brothers. All of them, like Father Hutot, displayed the semiskeletal thinness that was like the emblem of the Trappists here. Inside, the building was bright, for only the chapel, the refectory, and the monks’ dormitory had roofs. There was a garden, an orchard, a yard with fowl, a cemetery, and a kitchen with a large stove.

“What crime have these people committed that you ask me to take them away in secret from the authorities?”

“Being poor, Consul,” said Dom Jesualdo, sorrowfully. “You know that very well. You’ve just seen in Walla what it means to be poor, humble, and Congolese.”

Roger agreed. Surely it was an act of mercy to give the help the Trappists had requested. But he hesitated. As a diplomat, secretly spiriting away fugitives from justice, even if persecuted for unjust reasons, was risky. It could compromise Great Britain and completely taint the informative mission he was carrying out for the Foreign Office.

“May I see and speak to them?”

Dom Jesualdo agreed. Father Hutot withdrew and returned with the group almost immediately. There were seven, all male, including three boys. They all had their left hands cut off or maimed by blows from a rifle butt, and traces of lashes from a chicote on their chests and backs. The head of the group was named Mansunda and wore a crest of feathers and necklaces of animal teeth; his face displayed old scars from the initiation rites of his tribe. Father Hutot acted as interpreter. Twice in a row the village of Bonginda had not fulfilled its deliveries of rubber—the trees in the area had run out of latex—to the emissaries of the Lulonga Company, the concessionary in the region. Then the African guards brought to the village by the Force Publique began to whip them and cut off hands and feet. There was an outburst of rage and the village rebelled and killed a guard while the others managed to run away. A few days later Bonginda was occupied by a column of the Force Publique that set fire to all the houses, killed a good number of the residents, men and women, burning some inside their huts and taking the rest to the jail in Coquilhatville and the maison d’otages. Chief Mansunda believed they were the only ones who had escaped, thanks to the Trappists. If the Force Publique captured them they would be victims of extreme punishment, like all the rest, because throughout the Congo rebellion by the natives was always punished by the extermination of the entire community.

“Fine, mon père,” said Roger. “I’ll take them with me on the Henry Reed until they’re away from here. But only to the closest French shore.”

“God will reward you, Consul,” said Father Hutot.

“I don’t know, mon père,” replied the consul. “In this case you and I are breaking the law.”

“Man’s law,” the Trappist corrected him. “We are violating it, and rightly so, in order to be faithful to God’s law.”

Roger shared the monks’ frugal vegetarian supper. He spoke with them for a long time. Dom Jesualdo joked that in his honor the Trappists were violating the rule of silence that governed the order. The monks and lay brothers seemed oppressed and defeated by this country, just as he was. How could it have come to this, he reflected aloud with them. And he told them that nineteen years earlier he had come to Africa filled with enthusiasm, convinced the colonial enterprise was going to bring a decent life to the Africans. How was it possible that colonization had become this horrible plundering, this dizzying cruelty, with people who called themselves Christians torturing, mutilating, killing defenseless creatures and subjecting them, even children and the old, to atrocious cruelties? Hadn’t we Europeans come here to put an end to the slave trade and bring the religion of charity and justice? Because what occurred here was even worse than the slave trade, wasn’t it?

The monks let him unburden himself, not saying a word. Was it because, in spite of what the abbot said, they didn’t want to break the rule of silence? No: they were as confused and wounded by the Congo as he was.

“God’s ways are inscrutable to poor sinners like us, Consul,” Dom Jesualdo said with a sigh. “The important thing is not to fall into despair. Not to lose faith. That there are men here like you encourages us, returns hope to us. We wish you success in your mission. We will pray that God permits you to do something for these unfortunate people.”

The seven fugitives boarded the Henry Reed at dawn the next day, at a bend in the river, when the steamboat was already some distance from Coquilhatville. For the three days they were with him, Roger was tense and anxious. He had given the crew a vague explanation to justify the presence of the seven mutilated natives and thought the men distrusted and looked with suspicion at the group, with whom they had no communication. At Irebu, the Henry Reed approached the French side of the Congo River and that night, while the crew slept, seven silent silhouettes slipped away and disappeared into the undergrowth on the bank. Afterward no one asked the consul what had become of them.

At this point in his journey, Roger began to feel ill. Not only morally and psychologically, but his body, too, was showing the effects of lack of sleep, insect bites, excessive physical effort, and perhaps, above all, his state of mind as rage alternated with demoralization, the desire to complete his work with the premonition that his report would do no good because in London the bureaucrats in the Foreign Office and the politicians in His Majesty’s service would decide it was imprudent to antagonize an ally like Leopold II, that publishing a report with such serious accusations would have detrimental consequences for Great Britain, since it would be equivalent to pushing Belgium into the arms of Germany. Weren’t the interests of the Empire more important than the plaintive laments of some half-naked savages who worshiped felines and serpents and were cannibals?

Making superhuman efforts to control the squalls of depression, the headaches and nausea, the deterioration of his body—he felt he was losing weight, because he had to make new holes in his belt—he continued visiting villages, posts, stations, questioning villagers, functionaries, employees, guards, rubber harvesters, doing his best to overcome the daily spectacle of bodies martyrized by whippings, hands chopped off, and nightmarish accounts of murders, imprisonments, extortions, and disappearances. He began to think the generalized suffering of the Congolese had saturated the air, the river, the vegetation around him with a particular odor, a stench that not only was physical but also spiritual, metaphysical.

“I believe I’m losing my mind, dear Gee,” he wrote to his cousin Gertrude from the station at Bongandanga on the day he decided to turn around halfway and return to Leopoldville. “Today I’ve begun my return to Boma. According to my plans, I should have continued on the Upper Congo for a few more weeks. But the truth is I already have more than enough material to show the things that occur here in my report. I’m afraid if I continue to scrutinize the extremes to which human evil and ignorance can go, I won’t even be able to write it. I’m on the verge of madness. A normal human being cannot submerge himself for so many months in this hell without losing his sanity, without succumbing to some mental disturbance. Some nights, in my sleeplessness, I feel it happening to me. Something is disintegrating in my mind. I live with constant anguish. If I continue so close to what occurs here I too will eventually give whippings with a chicote, lop off hands, and murder Congolese between lunch and dinner without feeling the slightest pang of conscience or losing my appetite. Because that is what happens to Europeans in this damned country.”

Yet that very long letter did not deal primarily with the Congo, but with Ireland. “This is why, dear Gee, it may seem like another symptom of madness to you, but this journey into the depths of the Congo has been useful in helping me discover my own country and understand her situation, her destiny, her reality. In these jungles I’ve found not only the true face of Leopold II. I’ve also found my true self: the incorrigible Irishman. When we see each other again you’ll have a surprise, Gee. It will be difficult for you to recognize your cousin Roger. I have the impression that, like certain ophidians, I’ve shed the skin of my mind and perhaps my soul.”

During all the days it took the Henry Reed to sail down the Congo River to Leopoldville–Kinshasa, where it finally docked at dusk on September 15, 1903, the consul barely said a word to the crew. He had remained in his narrow cabin or, if the weather permitted, lay on his hammock in the stern, the faithful John settled at his feet, still and attentive, as if the sorrow in which he saw his master submerged had infected him, too.

Simply thinking about the country of his childhood and youth, for which he had suddenly felt profound nostalgia during this entire journey, pushed out of his mind the images of Congolese horror bent on destroying him morally and perturbing his psychic equilibrium. He recalled his early years in Dublin, spoiled and protected by his mother, his school years in Galgorm, his outings with his sister Nina in the northern countryside of Antrim (so tame compared with Africa!) and the happiness afforded by those excursions to the peaks guarding Glenshesk, his favorite of the nine glens of the county, summits raked by the winds where he could sometimes see the flight of eagles, their great wings spread and crests erect, defying the sky.

Wasn’t Ireland a colony too, like the Congo? Though for so many years he had insisted on not accepting a truth that his father and so many Ulster Irishmen like him rejected with blind indignation. Why would what was bad for the Congo be good for Ireland? Hadn’t the English invaded Ireland? Hadn’t they incorporated it into the Empire by force, not consulting those who had been invaded and occupied, just as the Belgians did with the Congolese? Over time the violence had eased, but Ireland was still a colony whose sovereignty disappeared because of a stronger neighbor. It was a reality that many Irish refused to see. How would his father react if he had heard him saying such things? Would he pull out his small chicote? And his mother? Would Anne Jephson be scandalized if she knew that in the desolation of the Congo her son was becoming, if not in deed at least in thought, a nationalist? On those solitary afternoons, surrounded by the brown waters of the Congo River filled with leaves, branches, and tree trunks, Roger made a decision: as soon as he returned to Europe, he would obtain a good collection of books dedicated to the history and culture of Ireland, which he hardly knew.

He spent barely three days in Leopoldville, not seeking anyone out. In his current state he didn’t have the heart to visit authorities and acquaintances and speak to them—lying, of course—about his voyage along the Middle and Upper Congo and what he had seen during those months. He sent a telegram in code to the Foreign Office saying he had enough material to confirm the accusations of mistreatment of indigenous people. He requested authorization to move to the neighboring Portuguese possession to write his report with more serenity than he would have subject to the pressures of consular service in Boma. And he wrote a long denunciation that was also a formal protest to the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Leopoldville–Kinshasa regarding the events in Walla, requesting an investigation and sanctions for those responsible. He carried his document personally to the Prosecutor’s Office. A circumspect functionary promised to inform the prosecutor, Maître Leverville, of everything as soon as he returned from an elephant hunt with the head of the city’s Office of Commercial Records, M. Clothard.

Roger took the train to Matadi, where he stayed only one night. From there he went down to Boma in a cargo steamer. In the consular office he found a pile of correspondence and a telegram from his superiors authorizing him to travel to Luanda to write his report. It was urgent that he write it, and in the greatest detail possible. In Britain, the campaign of accusations against the Congo Free State had reached a frenzy and the principal daily papers were taking part, confirming or denying “the atrocities.” For some time, in addition to the denunciations of the Baptist Church, there were those of Edmund D. Morel, the British journalist of French origin and Roger’s secret friend and accomplice. His publications were causing a great deal of agitation in both the House of Commons and in public opinion. There had already been a debate in parliament on the subject. The Foreign Office and Lord Chancellor Lansdowne himself were impatiently awaiting Roger’s testimony.

In Boma, as in Leopoldville–Kinshasa, Roger avoided government people as much as he could, even breaking protocol, something he had never done in all his years in the consular service. Instead of visiting the governor-general he sent him a letter, apologizing for not going in person to pay his respects and claiming problems with his health. He didn’t play a single game of tennis, billiards, or cards and didn’t give or accept invitations to lunches or dinners. He didn’t even go to swim early in the morning in the backwaters of the river, something he usually did almost every day, even in bad weather. He didn’t want to see people or have any social life. Above all, he didn’t want to be asked about his journey and find himself obliged to lie. He was sure he could never describe sincerely to his friends and acquaintances in Boma what he thought about everything he had seen, heard, and experienced on the Middle and Upper Congo in the past fourteen weeks.

He devoted all his time to resolving the most urgent consular matters and preparing his trip to Cabinda and Luanda. He hoped that by leaving the Congo, even though he went to another colonial possession, he would feel less oppressed and freer. Several times he tried to begin a rough draft of the report but couldn’t. Not only his dejection stopped him; his right hand contracted in a muscle spasm as soon as he began to move pen on paper. His hemorrhoids returned. He barely ate and his two servants, Charlie and Mawuku, concerned at seeing him in such bad health, told him to call the doctor. But even though he, too, was uneasy about his insomnia, lack of appetite, and physical ailments, he didn’t because seeing Dr. Salabert would mean speaking, remembering, recounting everything that for the moment he wanted only to forget.

On September 28 he left by boat for Banana and there, the following day, another small steamboat transported him and Charlie to Cabinda. John the bulldog stayed behind with Mawuku. But not even the four days he spent there, where he had acquaintances with whom he ate dinner and who, since they knew nothing about his trip to the Upper Congo, did not oblige him to speak about what he wished to keep silent, made him feel calmer and more sure of himself. Only in Luanda, where he arrived on October 3, did he begin to feel better. The British consul, Mr. Briskley, a discreet, obliging person, furnished him with a small room in his suite of offices. There he began at last to work morning and evening, sketching the large contours of his report.

But he felt he was beginning to be really well, to be the man he had been before, only three or four days after arriving in Luanda, one afternoon as he sat at a table in the old Café Paris, where he went to eat after working all morning. He was glancing at an old newspaper from Lisbon when he noticed, on the street outside, several half-naked natives unloading a large wagon filled with bales of some agricultural product, perhaps cotton. One of them, the youngest, was very beautiful. He had a long, athletic body, muscles that appeared on his back, legs, and arms with the effort he was making. His dark skin, gleaming with sweat, had a blue tinge. With the movements he made as he carried the load on his shoulder from the wagon to the interior of the storehouse, the light piece of cloth he wore around his hips opened and offered a glimpse of his sex, reddish and dangling and larger than normal. Roger felt a warm surge and an urgent desire to photograph the handsome porter. It hadn’t happened to him for months. A thought animated him: I’m myself again. In the small diary he always carried with him, he wrote: “Very beautiful and enormous. I followed him and persuaded him. We kissed hidden by the giant ferns in a clearing. He was mine, I was his. I howled.” He breathed deeply, in a fever.

That same afternoon, Mr. Briskley handed him a telegram from the Foreign Office. The lord chancellor himself, Lord Lansdowne, ordered him to return to England immediately to write his Report on the Congo in London. Roger had recovered his appetite and dined well that night.

On November 6, before boarding the Zaire, which left Luanda for England with a stop in Lisbon, he wrote a long letter to Edmund D. Morel. They had been corresponding secretly for six months but had never met. He first learned of his existence in a letter from Herbert Ward, who admired the journalist, and then in Boma, listening to Belgian functionaries and other random people commenting on the extremely harsh articles loaded with criticisms of the Congo Free State that Morel, who lived in Liverpool, was publishing, denouncing the abuses that victimized the natives of the African colony. Discreetly, through his cousin Gertrude, he obtained some pamphlets edited by Morel. Impressed by the seriousness of his accusations, in a bold gesture Roger wrote to him, sending the letter through Gee. He told him he had been in Africa for many years and could give him firsthand information for his righteous campaign, which he supported. He couldn’t do this openly because of his position as a British diplomat, and therefore it was necessary to take precautions with their correspondence in order to keep his informant in Boma from being identified. In the letter he wrote to Morel from Luanda, Roger summarized his most recent experience and said that as soon as he reached Europe, he would get in touch with him. Nothing made him more hopeful than a personal meeting with the only European who seemed fully conscious of the Old Continent’s responsibility for the transformation of the Congo into a hell.

On the trip to London, Roger recovered energy, enthusiasm, and hope. Once again he was certain his report would be useful in putting an end to those horrors. The impatience with which the Foreign Office awaited his report demonstrated this. The facts were of such magnitude that the British government would have to act, demand radical changes, convince its allies, revoke the senseless personal concession to Leopold II of an immense Congo. In spite of the storms that shook the Zaire between São Tomé and Lisbon and caused half the crew to be seasick, Roger managed to continue writing his report. As disciplined as he had once been, and devoted with apostolic zeal to the task, he tried to write with the greatest precision and sobriety without recourse to sentimentality or subjective considerations, describing objectively only what he had been able to confirm. The more exact and concise the report, the more persuasive and effective it would be.

He arrived in London on the first day of an icy December. He barely had time to look at the rainy, cold, and spectral city, because once he left his luggage in his Philbeach Gardens apartment, in Earls Court, and glanced at the accumulated correspondence, he had to hurry to the Foreign Office. For three days there were meetings and interviews. He was very impressed. No doubt about it, the Congo was at the center of the news following the debate in parliament. The denunciations of the Baptist Church and Edmund D. Morel’s campaign had been effective. Everyone was demanding a statement from the government, which was waiting for his report before making one. Roger discovered that without desiring or knowing it, circumstances had made him an important man. In two hour-long presentations, before functionaries of the ministry—the director for African affairs and the vice-minister attended one of them—he could see the impact his words had on the audience. The initial incredulous looks turned into expressions of repugnance and horror when he responded to questions with new details.

They gave him an office in a quiet spot in Kensington, far from the Foreign Office, and a young, efficient typist, Mr. Joe Pardo. He began dictating his report on Friday, December 4. News had spread that the British consul in the Congo had arrived in London with an exhaustive document on the colony, and the Reuters agency, The Spectator, The Times, and several correspondents for papers in the United States tried to interview him. But he, by agreement with his superiors, said he would speak with the press only after the government had made a statement on the subject.

In the days following he did nothing but work on the report morning and evening, adding, cutting, and rewriting the text, reading over and over again his copybooks with travel notes he already knew by heart. At midday he ate a sandwich, and every night he had dinner early at his club, the Wellington. Sometimes Herbert Ward joined him. It did him good to talk with his old friend, who dragged him one day to his studio, at 53 Chester Square, and distracted him by showing him his sculptures inspired by Africa. On another day, to make him forget his obsessive preoccupation for a few hours, Herbert obliged him to go out and buy a stylish jacket of checked cloth, a French-style cap, and shoes with white spats. Then he took him for lunch to the favorite spot of London intellectuals and artists, the Eiffel Tower restaurant. During this time, these were his only diversions.

Since his arrival he had asked the Foreign Office for authorization to have an interview with Morel. He gave as a pretext his desire to check some of his data with the journalist. He received its authorization on December 9. And the next day, Roger Casement and Edmund D. Morel saw each other’s face for the first time. Instead of shaking hands, they embraced. They talked, had dinner together at the Comedy, went to Roger’s apartment in Philbeach Gardens where they spent the rest of the night drinking cognac, chatting, smoking, and debating until they saw through the blinds that it was the next day. They had spent twelve hours in uninterrupted dialogue. Afterward they both would say this meeting had been the most important of their lives.

They couldn’t have been more different. Roger was tall and very thin, and Morel was rather short and husky, with a tendency to put on weight. Every time he saw him, Roger had the impression that his friend’s suits were too tight. Roger was thirty-nine, but in spite of the physical effects of the African climate and malaria, he looked, perhaps because of how carefully he dressed, younger than Morel, who was only thirty-two; Morel had been good-looking when younger but now had aged, with badly cut hair that was already gray, like his handlebar mustache, and burning, somewhat bulging eyes. Seeing the other man was enough for them to like and—they would not have thought the word exaggerated—love each other.

What did they talk about for those twelve uninterrupted hours? A great deal about Africa, of course, but also about their families, their childhoods, their adolescent dreams, ideals, and longings, and about how, without their intending it, the Congo had established itself at the center of their lives and transformed them completely. Roger was amazed that someone who had never been there knew the country so well: its geography, history, people, and problems. He listened in fascination to how, many years ago now, Morel, an obscure employee of the Elder Dempster Line (the same company Roger had worked for as a young man in Liverpool), responsible in the port of Antwerp for inspecting the ships and making an audit of their cargos, began to be suspicious when he noticed that the free trade His Majesty Leopold II had supposedly opened between Europe and the Congo Free State was not merely asymmetrical but a farce. What kind of free trade was it when the ships that came from the Congo to the great Flemish port unloaded tons of rubber and quantities of ivory, palm oil, minerals, and skins, and to go there carried only rifles, chicotes, and cases of colored glass?

This was how Morel began to be interested in the Congo, to investigate, to ask those who went there or returned to Europe, merchants, functionaries, travelers, pastors, priests, adventurers, soldiers, police officers, and to read everything he could lay his hands on about that immense country whose misfortunes he came to know thoroughly, as if he had undertaken dozens of inspection tours like the ones Roger had made to the Middle and Upper Congo. Then, without giving up his position in the company yet, he began to write letters and articles in magazines and newspapers in Belgium and Britain, at first under a pseudonym and later using his own name, denouncing what he had discovered and disproving with facts and testimonies the idyllic image of the Congo that hacks in the service of Leopold II offered to the world. He had been doing this for many years, publishing articles, pamphlets, and books, speaking in churches, cultural centers, and political organizations. His campaign had caught fire. Many people now supported him. This is Europe too, Roger often thought, not only the colonists, police, and criminals we send to Africa. Europe is also this clear, exemplary spirit: Edmund D. Morel.

From then on they saw each other often and continued the dialogues that excited both of them. They began to call each other by affectionate pseudonyms: Roger was Tiger and Edmund Bulldog. During one of these conversations the idea emerged of creating a foundation, the Congo Reform Association. Both were surprised by the vast support they received in their efforts to obtain sponsors and adherents. The truth is that very few of the politicians, journalists, writers, clergy, and well-known figures they asked to help the association refused. This was how Roger met Alice Stopford Green. Herbert Ward introduced them. Alice was one of the first to give her money, her name, and her time to the association. Joseph Conrad did as well, and many intellectuals and artists followed his lead. They gathered funds and respectable names and very soon began their public activities in churches and cultural and humanitarian centers, presenting testimonies, promoting debates and publications to open the public’s eyes to the true situation in the Congo. Even though Roger, as a diplomat, could not appear officially on the association’s board of directors, he dedicated all his free time to it once he had finally turned in his report to the Foreign Office. He donated a portion of his savings and salary to the association and wrote letters, visited many people, and succeeded in persuading a good number of diplomats and politicians to become promoters of the cause Morel and he defended.

Many years later, when Roger thought about those feverish weeks at the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1904, he would tell himself that most important for him had not been the popularity he achieved even before His Majesty’s government published his Report, or much later, when agents in the service of Leopold II began to attack him in the press as an enemy and slanderer of Belgium, but, thanks to Morel, the association, and Herbert, his meeting Alice Stopford Green, whose intimate friend and, as he boasted, disciple he would be from that time on. From the first moment there sprang up between them an understanding and affection that time would only make more profound.

The second or third time they were alone, Roger opened his heart to his new friend, as a believer would have done with his confessor. He dared tell her, like him from an Irish Protestant family, what he hadn’t told anyone yet: there in the Congo, living with injustice and violence, he had discovered the great lie of colonialism and begun to feel “Irish,” that is, like the citizen of a country occupied and exploited by the Empire that had bled and weakened Ireland. He was ashamed of so many things he had said and believed, repeating his father’s teachings. And he vowed to make amends. Now that he had discovered Ireland, thanks to the Congo, he wanted to be a real Irishman, know his country, take possession of her tradition, history, and culture.

Affectionate, somewhat maternal—Alice was nineteen years older—she reprimanded him at times for having childish bouts of enthusiasm when he was a man of forty, but helped him with advice, books, talks that were for him master classes, while they had tea with biscuits or scones with cream and marmalade. In those early months of 1904, Alice Stopford Green was his friend, his teacher, the woman who introduced him to an ancient past where history, myth, and legend—reality, religion, and fiction—blended together to create the tradition of a people who, in spite of the denationalizing drive of the Empire, continued to maintain their language, their way of being, their customs, something about which any Irish man or woman, Protestant or Catholic, believer or doubter, liberal or conservative, had to feel proud and obliged to defend. Nothing helped so much to calm Roger’s spirit, cure him of the moral wounds caused by his trip to the Upper Congo, as having established a friendship with Morel and with Alice. One day as she was saying goodbye to Roger, who, having requested a three-month leave from the Foreign Office, was about to leave for Dublin, the historian said: “Do you realize you’ve become a celebrity, Roger? Everybody is talking about you here, in London.”

It wasn’t something that pleased him, since he had never been vain. But Alice was telling him the truth. The publication of his Report by the British government had enormous repercussions in the press, parliament, the political class, and public opinion. The attacks aimed at him in Belgium in official publications, and by English gossip columnists who were propagandists for Leopold II, served only to strengthen his image as a great humanitarian fighter for justice. He was interviewed in the press, invited to speak at public meetings and at private clubs, showered with invitations from liberal and anticolonialist salons, and leaflets and articles appeared praising to the skies his Report and his commitment to the cause of justice and freedom. The Congo campaign took on a new impetus. The press, the churches, the most advanced sectors of British society, horrified at the revelations in the Report, demanded that Great Britain ask her allies to revoke the decision by the Western countries to hand the Congo to the king of the Belgians.

Overwhelmed by this sudden fame—people recognized him in theaters and restaurants and pointed him out with interest on the street—Roger left for Ireland. He spent a few days in Dublin but soon continued on to Ulster, North Antrim, and Magherintemple House, the family home of his childhood and adolescence. His uncle and namesake Roger, the son of Great-Uncle John, who had died in 1902, had inherited it. Aunt Charlotte was still alive. She received him with great affection, as did his other family members, cousins and nieces and nephews. But he felt that an invisible distance had grown up between him and his paternal family, who were still committed Anglophiles. Yet the Magherintemple countryside, the big old house of gray stone, surrounded by sycamores resistant to salt and wind, many of them smothered in ivy, the poplars, elms, and beech trees dominating the meadows where sheep lay, and beyond that the sea, the view of the island of Rathlin and the small town of Ballycastle with its snow-white cottages, moved him deeply. Walking though the stables, the orchard at the back of the house, the large rooms with deer antlers on the walls, or the ancient villages of Cushendun and Cushendall, where several generations of ancestors were buried, brought back memories of his childhood and filled him with nostalgia. But new ideas and feelings about his country meant that this visit, of several months’ duration, would become another great adventure for him. An adventure, unlike his journey to the Upper Congo, that was pleasant and stimulating and which would also give him the sensation as he lived it that he was shedding his skin.

He had brought a pile of books, grammars, and essays, recommended by Alice, and he spent many hours reading about Irish traditions and legends. He tried to learn Gaelic, first on his own and, when he realized he never would, with the help of a teacher from whom he took lessons several times a week.

But, above all, he began to spend time with new people from County Antrim who were Protestant like him but were not unionists. On the contrary, they wanted to preserve the personality of ancient Ireland, fought against the Anglicization of the country, defended the return to old Irish, traditional songs and customs, and opposed the recruitment of Irishmen into the British Army. They dreamed of a separate Ireland, safe from destructive modern industrialism, living a bucolic, rural life, liberated from the British Empire. This was how Roger became connected to the Gaelic League, which promoted Irish and the culture of Ireland and from which Sinn Féin (“Ourselves Alone”) would emerge. When it was founded in Dublin, in 1893, its president, Douglas Hyde, reminded the audience in his speech that until then, “only six books had been published in Gaelic.” Roger met Hyde’s successor, Eoin MacNeill, professor of ancient and medieval Irish history at University College, and they became friends. He began to attend readings, lectures, recitals, marches, academic assemblies, and the raising of monuments to nationalist heroes, sponsored by the Gaelic League and the new Sinn Féin party. And he began to write political articles defending Irish culture in its publications under the pseudonym Shan van Vocht (“The Poor Old Woman”), taken from an old Irish ballad he was in the habit of humming. At the same time he grew very close to a group of women, among them Maud Young, the chatelaine of Galgorm Rose; Ada McNeill; and Margaret Dobbs, who traveled the villages of Antrim collecting old legends from Irish folklore. Thanks to them he heard a seanchaí, or traveling storyteller, at a popular fair, though he barely could understand more than a word or two of what he said.

During an argument in Magherintemple House with his uncle one night, Roger declared excitedly, “Like the Irishman I am, I hate the British Empire.”

The next day he received a letter from the Duke of Argyll informing him that His Majesty’s government had decided to honor him with the decoration Companion of St. Michael and St. George for his excellent service in the Congo. Roger excused himself from attending the investiture ceremony by claiming that a knee problem would not allow him to kneel before the king.

VII

“You hate me and can’t hide it,” Roger Casement said. The sheriff, after a moment’s surprise, agreed with a grimace that for an instant transformed his bloated face.

“I have no reason to hide it,” he murmured. “But you’re wrong. I don’t feel hatred for you. I feel contempt. That’s all traitors deserve.”

They were walking along the corridor of soot-stained bricks toward the visitors’ room, where the Catholic chaplain, Father Carey, was waiting for the prisoner. Through the narrow barred windows, Roger could see large patches of dark, swollen clouds. Was it raining there, outside, on the Caledonian Road and the Roman Way, where centuries ago the first Roman legionnaires marched through forests filled with bears? He imagined the stalls and stands at the nearby market, in the middle of Islington’s large park, soaked and shaken by the storm. He felt a sting of envy, thinking about the people who were buying and selling, protected by raincoats and umbrellas.

“You had everything,” the sheriff grumbled behind him. “Diplomatic posts. Decorations. The king knighted you. And you went and sold yourself to the Germans. How vile. How ungrateful.”

He fell silent and Roger thought the sheriff was sighing.

“Whenever I think about my poor son killed over there in the trenches, I tell myself you’re one of his killers, Mr. Casement.”

“I’m very sorry you lost a son,” Roger replied, not turning around. “I know you won’t believe me, but I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

“You won’t have time left to do that now,” was the sheriff’s judgment. “Thank God.”

They had reached the door of the visitors’ room. The sheriff stayed outside, next to the jailer on guard. Only visits from chaplains were private. In all the others the sheriff or a guard always remained, and sometimes both. Roger was happy to see the stylized silhouette of the cleric. Father Carey came forward to meet him and took his hand.

“I made inquiries and have the reply,” he announced, smiling. “Your memory was exact. In effect, you were baptized as a child in the parish of Rhyl, in Wales. Your name is in the register. Your mother and two of your maternal aunts were present. You don’t need to be received again into the Catholic Church. You’ve always been in it.”

Roger agreed. The very distant impression that had accompanied him his whole life was, in fact, correct. His mother had baptized him, hiding it from his father, on one of their trips to Wales. He was glad because of the complicity the secret established between him and Anne Jephson. And because in this way he felt more in tune with himself, his mother, and Ireland. As if his approach to Catholicism were a natural consequence of everything he had done and attempted in these last few years, including his mistakes and failures.

“I’ve been reading Thomas à Kempis, Father Carey,” he said. “Earlier, I could barely manage to concentrate on reading. But recently I’ve been able to. Several hours a day. The Imitation of Christ is a very beautiful book.”

“When I was in the seminary we read a good deal of Thomas à Kempis,” the priest agreed. “Especially The Imitation of Christ.”

“I feel calmer when I can manage to become involved in those pages,” said Roger. “As if I had cut free from this world and entered another one with no preoccupations, a purely spiritual reality. Father Crotty was right to recommend it to me so often in Germany. He never imagined under what circumstances I’d read the book he admired so much.”

Not long before, a small bench had been installed in the visitors’ room. They sat on it, their knees touching. Father Carey had been a chaplain in London prisons for more than twenty years and accompanied many men condemned to death on their final journey. His constant dealings with prison populations had not hardened his character. He was considerate and attentive, and Roger liked him from their first encounter. He did not recall ever having heard him say anything that might wound him; on the contrary, when it was time to ask questions or talk to him he showed extreme delicacy. He always felt good with him. Father Carey was tall, bony, almost skeletal, with very white skin and a graying, pointed beard that covered only part of his chin. His eyes were always damp, as if he had just cried, even though he was laughing.

“What was Father Crotty like?” he asked. “I can see you two got along very well in Germany.”

“If it hadn’t been for Father Crotty I would have gone mad during those months in the Limburg camp,” Roger agreed. “He was very different from you, physically. Shorter, more robust, and instead of your pallor he had a red face that grew even redder with the first glass of beer. But from another point of view, he did resemble you. In his generosity, I mean.”

Father Crotty was an Irish Dominican sent from Rome by the Vatican to the prisoner-of-war camp the Germans had set up in Limburg. His friendship had been a life raft for Roger during those months in 1915 and 1916 when he was trying to recruit volunteers for the Irish Brigade from among the prisoners.

“He was a man immune to discouragement,” said Roger. “I went with him to visit the sick, administer the sacraments, pray the rosary with the prisoners at Limburg. A nationalist as well. Though less impassioned than me, Father Carey.”

The priest smiled.

“Don’t think that Father Crotty tried to bring me closer to Catholicism,” Roger added. “He was very careful in our conversations so I wouldn’t feel he wanted to convert me. That was happening to me on my own, here inside,” he said, touching his breast. “I was never very religious, as I’ve told you. Ever since my mother died, religion for me had been something mechanical and secondary. Only after 1903, after that trip of three months and ten days into the interior of the Congo that I told you about, did I pray again. When I thought I would lose my mind in the face of so much suffering. That was how I discovered that a human being can’t live without believing.”

He felt his voice would break and stopped speaking.

“Did he discuss Thomas à Kempis with you?”

“He was very devoted to him,” Roger agreed. “He gave me his copy of The Imitation of Christ. But I couldn’t read it then. I didn’t have the head for it with all the concerns I had at the time. I left that copy in Germany, in a suitcase with my clothes. They didn’t allow us to carry luggage on the submarine. Just as well you found me another one. I’m afraid I won’t have time to finish it.”

“The British government hasn’t decided anything yet,” the priest admonished him. “You mustn’t lose hope. There are many people outside who love you and are making enormous efforts to have the petition for clemency heard.”

“I know that, Father Carey. In any event, I’d like you to prepare me. I want to be accepted formally by the Church. Receive the sacraments. Make my confession. Take communion.”

“That’s why I’m here, Roger. I assure you you’re already prepared for all of that.”

“One doubt distresses me a great deal,” said Roger, lowering his voice as if someone else might hear him. “Won’t my conversion to Christ seem inspired by fear? The truth is, Father Carey, I’m afraid. Very afraid.”

“He is wiser than you and me,” the priest declared. “I don’t believe Christ sees anything wrong in a man being afraid. He was, I’m sure, on the road to Calvary. It’s the most human thing there is, isn’t it? We all feel fear, it’s part of our condition. Just a little sensitivity is enough for us to sometimes feel powerless and frightened. Your approach to the Church is pure, Roger. I know that.”

“I was never afraid of death until now. I saw it at close range many times. In the Congo, on expeditions through inhospitable places filled with wild animals. In Amazonia, in rivers filled with whirlpools and surrounded by outlaws. Just a short while ago, when I left the submarine at Tralee, on Banna Strand, when the rowboat capsized and it seemed we would all drown. I’ve often felt death very close. And I wasn’t afraid. But I am now.”

His voice broke and he closed his eyes. For some days now these rushes of terror seemed to freeze his blood, stop his heart. His entire body had begun to tremble. He made an effort to be calm but failed. He felt the chattering of his teeth and to his panic was added embarrassment. When he opened his eyes he saw that Father Carey had his hands together and his eyes closed. He was praying in silence, barely moving his lips.

“It’s passed,” he mumbled in confusion. “I beg you to forgive me.”

“You don’t have to feel uncomfortable with me. Being afraid, weeping, is human.”

Now he was calm again. There was a great silence in Pentonville Prison, as if the prisoners and the jailers in its three enormous pavilions, those blocks with gable roofs, had died or fallen asleep.

“I thank you for not asking me anything about those loathsome things they apparently are saying about me, Father Carey.”

“I haven’t read them, Roger. When someone has attempted to talk to me about them, I’ve made him be quiet. I don’t know and don’t want to know what that’s about.”

“I don’t know either,” Roger said with a smile. “You can’t read newspapers here. One of my lawyer’s clerks told me they were so scandalous they put the petition for clemency at risk. Degeneracies, terrible vileness, it seems.”

Father Carey listened to him with his usual tranquil expression. The first time they had spoken in Pentonville, he told Roger that his paternal grandparents spoke Gaelic to each other but changed to English when they saw their children nearby. The priest hadn’t succeeded in learning ancient Irish either.

“I believe it’s better not to know what they’re accusing me of. Alice Stopford Green thinks it’s an operation mounted by the government to counteract the sympathy in many sectors for the petition for clemency.”

“Nothing can be excluded in the world of politics,” said the priest. “It’s not the cleanest of human activities.”

There were some discreet knocks at the door, which opened, and the sheriff’s plump face appeared:

“Five more minutes, Father Carey.”

“The director of the prison gave me half an hour. Weren’t you told?”

The sheriff’s face showed surprise.

“If you say so, I believe you.” He apologized. “Excuse the interruption, then. You still have twenty minutes.”

He disappeared and the door closed again.

“Is there more news from Ireland?” Roger asked, somewhat abruptly, as if he suddenly wanted to change the subject.

“It seems the shootings have stopped. Public opinion, not only there but in England, too, has been very critical of the summary executions. Now the government has announced that all those arrested in the Easter Rising will pass through the courts.”

Roger became distracted. He looked at the window in the wall, also barred. He saw only a tiny square of gray sky and thought about the great paradox: he had been tried and sentenced for carrying arms for an attempt at violent secession by Ireland, and in fact he had undertaken that dangerous, perhaps absurd trip from Germany to the coast near Tralee to try to stop the uprising he was sure would fail from the moment he learned it was being prepared. Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists.

“It’s likely I’ll go down in history as one of those responsible for the Easter Rising,” he said with irony. “You and I know I came here risking my life to try to stop that rebellion.”

“Well, you and I and someone else,” Father Carey said with a laugh, pointing up with a finger.

“Now I feel better, finally.” Roger laughed as well. “The panic has passed. In Africa I often saw blacks as well as whites fall suddenly into a crisis of despair. In the middle of the undergrowth, when we lost our way. When we entered a territory the African porters considered hostile. In the middle of the river, when a canoe overturned. Or in the villages sometimes, during ceremonies with singing and dancing directed by witch doctors. Now I know what those hallucinatory states brought on by fear are like. Are the trances of the mystics the same, the suspension of oneself and all carnal reflexes produced by the encounter with God?”

“It’s not impossible,” said Father Carey. “Perhaps the path traveled by the mystics and by all those who experience trance states is the same. Poets, musicians, sorcerers.”

They were silent for a long while. At times, out of the corner of his eye, Roger observed the priest and saw him motionless, his eyes closed. He’s praying for me, he thought. He’s a compassionate man. It must be terrible to spend your life helping people who are going to die on the gallows. Without ever having been in the Congo or Amazonia, Father Carey must be as well informed as he about the dizzying extremes reached by human cruelty and despair.

“For many years I was indifferent to religion,” he said, very slowly, as if talking to himself, “but I never stopped believing in God. In a general principle of life. Though it’s true, Father Carey, I often asked myself in horror how God could permit things like this to happen. What kind of God tolerates so many thousands of men, women, and children suffering such horrors? It’s difficult to understand, isn’t it? You must have seen so many things in the prisons; don’t you sometimes ask the same questions?”

Father Carey had opened his eyes and listened to him with his usual courteous expression, not affirming or denying.

“Those poor people whipped, mutilated, those children with their hands and feet chopped off, dying of hunger and disease,” Roger recited. “Those creatures squeezed to extinction and then murdered. Thousands, dozens, hundreds of thousands. By men who received a Christian education. I have seen them go to Mass, pray, take communion, before and after committing those crimes. Many days I thought I’d go mad, Father Carey. Perhaps, during those years in Africa, in Putumayo, I did. And everything that has happened to me since has been the work of someone who, though he didn’t realize it, was crazy.”

The chaplain didn’t say anything this time either. He listened with the same affable expression and patience for which Roger had always been grateful.

“Curiously, I believe it was in the Congo, when I had those periods of great demoralization and asked myself how God could permit so many crimes, that I began to be interested in religion again,” he continued. “Because the only beings who seemed to have maintained their sanity were some Baptist ministers and Catholic missionaries. Not all of them, of course. Many did not want to see what was happening past their own noses. But a few did what they could to stop the injustices. Real heroes.”

He fell silent. Recalling the Congo or Putumayo did him harm: it stirred up the mud in his spirit, brought back images that plunged him into anguish.

“Injustices, tortures, crimes,” murmured Father Carey. “Didn’t Christ suffer these in his own flesh? He can understand your state better than anyone, Roger. Of course the same thing happens to me at times. To all believers, I’m sure. It’s difficult to understand certain things, naturally. Our capacity for understanding is limited. We are fallible, imperfect. But I can tell you one thing. You’ve made many mistakes, like all human beings. But with regard to the Congo, to Amazonia, you cannot reproach yourself for anything. Your labor was generous and brave. You made many people open their eyes, you helped to correct great injustices.”

All the good I could have done is being destroyed by this campaign launched to ruin my reputation, Roger thought. It was a subject he preferred not to touch, one he pushed out of his mind each time it returned. The good thing about Father Carey’s visits was that with the chaplain, he spoke only about what he wanted to. The priest’s discretion was absolute, and he seemed to guess everything that might disturb Roger and avoided it. At times they did not say a word for a long while. Even so, the presence of the priest calmed him. When he left, Roger would remain serene and resigned for some hours.

“If the petition is rejected, will you be with me until the end?” he asked, not looking at him.

“Of course,” said Father Carey. “You shouldn’t think about that. Nothing has been decided yet.”

“I know that, Father Carey. I haven’t lost hope. But it does me good to know you will be there with me. Your presence will give me courage. I won’t make an unfortunate scene, I promise.”

“Would you like us to pray together?”

“Let’s talk a little more, if you don’t mind. This will be the last question I’ll ask you about the matter. If I’m executed, can my body be taken to Ireland and buried there?”

He sensed the chaplain hesitating and looked at him. Father Carey had paled slightly. He saw his discomfort as he shook his head.

“No, Roger. If that happens, you’ll be buried in the prison cemetery.”

“In enemy territory,” Roger murmured, trying to make a joke that failed. “In a country I’ve come to hate as much as I loved and admired it as a young man.”

“Hate doesn’t serve any purpose,” Father Carey said with a sigh. “The policies of England may be bad. But there are many decent, respectable English people.”

“I know that very well, Father. I tell myself that whenever I fill with hatred toward this country. It’s stronger than I am. Perhaps it happens because as a boy I believed blindly in the Empire and that England was civilizing the world. You would have laughed if you had known me then.”

The priest agreed and Roger suddenly gave a little laugh.

“They say converts are the worst,” he added. “My friends have always reproached me. Being too impassioned.”

“The incorrigible Irishman of legend,” said Father Carey, smiling. “My mother used to say that when I was little and misbehaved, ‘Your incorrigible Irishman got out.’”

“If you like, we can pray now, Father.”

Father Carey closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and began to murmur very quietly an Our Father, and then some Hail Marys. Roger closed his eyes and prayed as well, not letting his voice be heard. For a time he did this mechanically, without concentrating, while various images whirled around his head, until gradually he allowed himself to be absorbed by the prayer. When the sheriff knocked on the door of the visitors’ room and came in to warn them they had five minutes left, Roger was focused on the invocation.

Whenever he prayed he thought of his mother, that slim figure dressed in white, a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon that danced in the wind, walking under the trees in a field. Were they in Wales, in Ireland, in Antrim, in Jersey? He didn’t know where, but the countryside was as beautiful as the smile shining on Anne Jephson’s face. How proud young Roger felt holding the soft, tender hand that gave him so much security and joy. Praying like this was a marvelous balm, it brought back to him a childhood when, thanks to his mother’s presence, everything in life was beautiful and happy.

Father Carey asked if he wanted to send a message to anyone, if he could bring him anything on his next visit.

“All I want is to see you again, Father. You don’t know the good it does me to talk and listen to you.”

They parted with a handshake. In the long, damp corridor, without having planned it, Roger said to the sheriff:

“I’m very sorry about the death of your son. I haven’t had children. I imagine there’s no more terrible pain in this life.”

The sheriff made a small noise with his throat but did not respond. In his cell, Roger lay on his cot and picked up The Imitation of Christ. But he couldn’t concentrate. The letters danced before his eyes and in his head images threw out sparks in a mad round. The figure of Anne Jephson appeared more than once.

What would his life have been like if his mother, instead of dying so young, had been alive as he became an adolescent, a man? He probably would not have undertaken the African adventure. He would have remained in Ireland or in Liverpool and had a bureaucratic career and an honorable, obscure, and comfortable life with a wife and children. He smiled: no, that kind of life wasn’t for him. The one he had led, with all its misfortunes, was preferable. He had seen the world, his horizons had broadened enormously, he had a better understanding of life, human reality, the innermost core of colonialism, the tragedy of so many peoples caused by that aberration.

If Anne Jephson had lived he would not have discovered the sad, beautiful history of Ireland, the one they never taught him in Ballymena High School, the history still hidden from the children and adolescents of North Antrim. They were still made to believe that Ireland was a savage country with no past worth remembering, raised to civilization by the occupier, educated and modernized by the Empire, which stripped it of its tradition, language, and sovereignty. He had learned all this in Africa, where he never would have spent the best years of his youth and early maturity, or ever come to feel so much pride in the country where he was born and so much rage because of what Great Britain had done, if his mother had lived.

Were they justified, the sacrifices of his twenty years in Africa, the seven in South America, the year or so in the heart of the Amazonian jungles, the year and a half of loneliness, sickness, and frustration in Germany? He never had cared about money, but wasn’t it absurd that after having worked so hard all his life, he was now a pauper? The last balance in his bank account had been ten pounds sterling. He had never learned to save. He had spent all his income on others—on his three siblings, on humanitarian organizations such as the Congo Reform Association, and on Irish nationalist institutions such as St. Enda’s School and the Gaelic League, to which for some time he had handed over his entire income. In order to spend money on those causes he had lived very austerely, residing for long periods of time in very cheap boardinghouses not appropriate to his rank, as his colleagues at the Foreign Office had insinuated. No one would remember the donations, gifts, or assistance now that he had failed. Only his final defeat would be remembered.

But that was not the worst thing. Devil take it, the damn idea was back again. Degeneracies, perversions, vices, all human lewdness. That is what the British government wanted to remain of him. Not the diseases that the rigors of Africa had inflicted on him, jaundice, the malarial fevers that undermined his organism, arthritis, the surgeries for hemorrhoids, the rectal problems that had caused him so much suffering and shame from the first time an anal fissure had to be operated on in 1893.

“You should have come earlier, this operation would have been simple three or four months ago. Now it’s serious.”

“I live in Africa, doctor, in Boma, a place where my physician is a confirmed alcoholic whose hands tremble because of delirium tremens. Was I going to be operated on by Dr. Salabert, whose medical science is inferior to that of a Bakongo witch doctor?”

He had suffered from this almost his entire life. A few months earlier, in the German camp at Limburg, he’d had a hemorrhage sutured by a surly, coarse military doctor. When he decided to accept the responsibility of investigating the atrocities committed by the rubber barons in Amazonia, he was already very ill. He knew the effort would take him months and bring him only problems, and still he took it on, thinking he was serving justice. That part of him wouldn’t remain either if they executed him.

Could it be true that Father Carey had refused to read the scandalous things attributed to him by the press? The chaplain was a good man who displayed solidarity. If he had to die, having the priest near would help him maintain his dignity to the last moment.

Demoralization overwhelmed him completely. It turned him into a being as helpless as the Congolese attacked by the tsetse fly, whom sleeping sickness prevented from moving arms, feet, lips, or even keeping eyes open. Did it keep them from thinking as well? Unfortunately, these gusts of pessimism sharpened his lucidity, turned his brain into a crackling bonfire. The pages of the diary handed by the admiralty spokesman to the press, which so horrified the red-faced assistant to Maître Gavan Duffy, were they real or falsified? He thought of the stupidity that formed a central part of human nature, and also, naturally, of himself. He was very thorough and well known, as a diplomat, for not taking any initiative or the slightest step without foreseeing all possible consequences. And now, here he was, caught in a stupid trap he had constructed throughout his life, giving his enemies a weapon that would sink him in disrepute.

Startled, he realized he was bellowing with laughter.