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

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