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

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