The Dream of the Celt: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa

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