Pandora in the Congo Read online

  FURTHER PRAISE FOR

  PANDORA IN THE CONGO

  ‘To a bouillabaisse of H Rider Haggard Piñol adds a dash of Dave Eggers … Readers leave this book dizzy, unsure whether this was a tale of Empire’s sins or a cunning commentary on authorial deceit. A literary dynamite charge, it’s raucous and leaves everything shaken up.’

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  ‘Here’s a wonderful oddity – an adventure yarn that could stand alongside the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.’

  THE TIMES

  PRAISE FOR COLD SKIN

  ‘Superbly controlled and creepy, akin to Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness.’

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  ‘Thrillingly vivid … It overtook my dreams.’

  TOBY LITT

  ‘A philosophical tale wrapped in a gripping plot, a meditation on solitude, violence and what it means to be human, a great, creepy, tender read.’

  YANN MARTEL

  Albert

  Sánchez Piñol

  Pandora in the Congo

  Translated from the Catalan by

  Mara Faye Lethem

  The Congo. Just imagine a surface as large as England, France and Spain put together. Now imagine that entire surface covered with trees between twenty and two hundred feet high. And below the trees, nothing.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Also By Albert Sánchez Piñol

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ONE

  THIS STORY SEGAN WITH three funerals and ended with one broken heart. The summer of 1914 I was nineteen years old and half asthmatic, half pacifist and half writer. Half asthmatic: I coughed half as much as the sick and twice as much as the healthy. Half pacifist: because really I was too soft to be politically active in opposition to wars, I was just against participating in them myself. Half writer: the word ‘writer’ is too pretentious, and even when I say ‘half writer’, I’m exaggerating. I wrote books on assignment. Which is to say, I was a ghost writer, what the publishing world calls someone that writes books with other people’s names on the cover.

  Who remembers Doctor Luther Flag anymore? No one. And he’s better off forgotten. But before the Great War he enjoyed a certain popularity. He was one of those pulp writers. All of Doctor Flag’s stories –I never knew if he really was a doctor – were set in Africa and were exactly eighty pages long.

  There was always the same photo of Doctor Flag on the back cover: a man with a thick mop of white hair and a rectangular beard, whom life had led in a straight line along the path to wisdom. He leaned his body on a table where a large map of the black continent was spread. He pointed to some undiscovered spot with his finger; with the other hand he held a monocle in front of his right eye. His gaze implied all mysteries.

  There are few places that offer such a wide window of narrative elements as Black Africa. The Masai, the Zulu, the Boer rebels. The savannah, the jungle. Elephants, crocodiles, hippos and lions, explorers and hunters. All that stuff. With so many suggestive ingred ients and a lively imagination it was relatively easy to write a handful of facile stories. But Doctor Flag had become the most prolific author in the English language. He’d been publishing three novels a week for twenty years. And each one had its requisite eighty pages, which meant that every seven days he wrote two hundred and forty pages, an average, if my arithmetic is correct, of 34.2 pages daily. And nobody can write 34.2 pages each day for twenty years in a row. Nobody.

  In that period I met a man named Frank Strub. Strub was a ghost writer for Doctor Luther Flag. It was he who offered me the job. Since Doctor Flag paid him by the page, he was interested in writing as many pages as possible a day. Strub was married with three children, and three children are a big incentive to work extra hours. But everything has its limit. After a while working for Doctor Flag, Strub was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Even though we hadn’t known each other long, Strub was one of those men that are easy to get close to. One day he invited me to lunch in a cheap restaurant in north London filled with noise and blue-collar workers. There were so many people that we held the silverware with our arms glued to our necks, like the wings of hens in a coop. Noise reverberated through the restaurant and, even though we were right in front of each other, we had to shout like town criers to make ourselves understood.

  ‘Look, Tommy,’ said Strub after dessert, ‘if I keep this up they’ll have to put me away in a sanatorium. But old Flag demands a certain number of pages a week. If I don’t produce, he’ll fire me. That’s his strategy. He exploits a ghost writer until he’s worn out and then just finds another one. I can’t lose the work, Tommy, I’ve got three children.’

  ‘Oh, Frank,’ I said supportively, ‘that’s terrible.’

  ‘I thought that you could help me. I’ll pay you a little bit less than he pays me. I’ll make a small commission for the pages you write, it’s true, but take into account that I have three children. What’s more, you’re very young and you have no writing experience. I’m taking a risk.’

  I hesitated a bit. He wanted to wrap it up quickly. ‘Don’t worry, you just have to follow old Flag’s outlines. And remember: eighty pages, not one more or less. It’s a requirement for the printer. You want your first outline?’ he asked me with a wink. ‘Course you do, you’re dying to write it. Well, here you go.’

  And he handed me a couple of typed pages. He was still wiping his lips with the napkin when he stood up. ‘Waiter! This boy will get the bill.’ And turning towards me, ‘You don’t mind, do you Tommy? Look at it this way, I’ve got you a good job. More than a job: a chance to enter Parnassus. Must dash. I haven’t finished my pages for today.’

  ‘When do I need to have it written by?’ I asked.

  Strub laughed. ‘When? Yesterday. Get busy.’

  Once I got home I read the pages. It looked like Flag was in a rush even writing the outlines. They were a few pages typed quickly and carelessly. The outline was entitled Pandora in the Congo. It was my first contact with the literary industry. I guess that’s why I kept it. Here it is.

  PANDORA IN THE CONGO

  CHAPTER 1

  – Create a portrait of a Young Anglican Pastor.

  – Protagonist is called to accompany some Father Superiors who are returning to their African mission.

  (Remember that the protagonist ALWAYS has to be YOUNG and ATTRACTIVE, and in order to describe YOUTH and BEAUTY we need ADJECTIVES. You are completely ignorant of the art of using adjectives, I know. But I’m beginning to think that your extraordinarily limited intelligence is not even familiar with the concepts of YOUTH and BEAUTY.)

  SUBTOTAL chapter 1: 5 pages<
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  CHAPTER 2

  – Spiritual battle at the Mission, Protagonist notices that his Faith wavers once he is in Africa due to his contact with the wretchedness of paganism. And the black continent can easily turn into a Pandora’s Box, from which, once opened, spring forth monsters and ghosts. (Do you understand the title now??)

  – Protagonist goes deeper into the Jungle to reflect. A Lion wants to Devour him. Protagonist Tames Lion, whom he Baptises as SIMBA.

  – Protagonist and simba (remember, the tamed Lion) continue heading into the forest. They get lost. They discover a Roman Castrum!!!

  (Note: ‘Castrum’ is a Roman military camp. It’s not that I doubt your level of general cultural knowledge. I’ve defined ‘castrum’ because I doubt your ability to find any word with more than one syllable in the dictionary.)

  – The jungle castrum is inhabited by the remains of a Roman legion lost in the first century before Christ while searching for the source of the Nile. The colony has decreased in number and now there are only two left, two very blond, very military, archetypal legionnaires.

  (Obviously we have NO plausible explanation that would justify Roman legionnaires being able to genetically perpetuate themselves in the middle of a forest without the help of any female womb. This is the type of narrative incident where there is no other option except to resort to the SPORE THEORY.)

  – The two Roman legionnaires are engaged in a continual ongoing war with the surrounding pygmy tribes, who are extremely bellicose cannibals and tree-dwelling head shrinkers.

  SUBTOTAL chapter 2: 25 pages

  CHAPTER 3

  – Protagonist is unsure if he should spread GOD’S GOOD NEWS to the two legionnaires (they don’t know about it because their ancestors left the Roman empire in the first century BEFORE Christ, remember). Since he’s unsure if he’s lost his faith, he feels it would be a contradiction to evangelise the legionnaires.

  (Do you get this spiritual subtlety??????? I hope so.)

  SUBTOTAL chapter 3: 5 pages

  CHAPTER 4

  – Large battle between a horde of cannibal pygmies that attack the castrum and the Roman legionnaires that defend it. Protagonist is an active participant in the defence, as is Simba. – Protagonist does a scientific experiment with two pygmies captured in the battle. He cuts open their skulls and vivisects them in public, showing that they are NOT human, as opposed to the legionnaires who, as I’ve already said, are blond and speak Latin.

  – I forgot to mention before that the two legionnaires had given refuge to a Bantu princess who was very pretty but Negro and had also ended up lost at the castrum. The two brothers love her very much, but since they are very chaste they have never touched her. (STRESS THIS.) Our hero also falls in love with her. Important inner battle between lustful cravings and the desire for sainthood.

  SUBTOTAL chapter 4: 15 pages

  CHAPTER 5

  – There is a new attack by the pygmies, this time en masse. Millions of pygmies storm the Castrum and the two legionnaires end up dead, although they put up a heroic fight. The pygmies don’t kill the protagonist, obviously, because that would end the novel. They merely capture him. Simba is wounded in one paw. Faced with this catastrophe, the Pro tagonist insists that the lion escape, which loyal Simba resists, refusing to abandon his master. Still, eventually Simba obeys and heads further into the jungle. Before returning to their arboreal city the Pygmies spend the night at the castrum. The Protagonist and the Princess are tied to parallel stakes. The Princess confesses to our man that she is hopelessly in love with him!!!! But the fact that he is tied up keeps our man from succumbing to the passions of the flesh. (If we set up the scene in this skilful way we can avoid having sinful scenes in the story, which are always uncomfortable. Behold my narrative skill! That, sir, has a name that you are unfamiliar with in any of its variants: T-A-L-E-N-T.)

  – The pygmies take the Protagonist back with them as a trophy. The Bantu princess stays at the castrum with a small group of pygmy soldiers charged with negotiating her sale to some merchants of Arab slaves. Once the Protagonist gets to the pygmies’ arboreal city a big party begins. (They live in cabins built between the tree branches; make them like monkeys with a certain degree of manual dexterity.) Horrific nocturnal scene. The pygmies prepare the cauldron where they will boil the Protagonist. The pygmies drink blood out of the skulls of the legionnaires killed in combat. Orgy: millions of pygmies dancing and fornicating everywhere like a cloud of mosquitoes. (Orgy, indeed, but play down the erotic descriptions. Who knows what to expect from a degenerate like you.)

  SUBTOTAL chapter 5: 10 pages

  CHAPTER 6

  – In the morning the pygmies plan to cook and eat our man. The Protagonist warns them that if they try it ‘the Sun will disappear.’ (Of course, it’s an eclipse predicted by the astronomical calendar.) The horror of the pygmies when the sun is covered. Simba, who has faithfully come looking for his master even though he is wounded, attacks the pygmies ferociously and this adds confusion!

  – Protagonist and Simba flee.

  SUBTOTAL chapter 6: 15 pages

  CHAPTER 7

  – Protagonist and Simba annihilate, with humiliating ease, the few pygmies that had stayed at the Roman Castrum guarding the prisoner. Spectacular climactic emancipation of the Princess.

  – These events have made the Protagonist recover his faith in God. Grave disappointment on the part of the Princess when the Protagonist rejects her offer of marriage. (Give some satisfactory reason, whatever you want, but they do not get married. Nigger girls do not marry British men. And failed love stories sell more books, don’t ever forget it.) Bantu princess, Simba and Protagonist return to England. He also brings with him a particularly small pygmy, by which I mean a pygmy with dwarfism, as a scientific specimen.

  – Bantu princess is very happy in the convent. Lion Simba is very happy in the zoo. Dwarf pygmy is very happy in the zoo. Protagonist visits them periodically and maintains a friendship with all three that is beyond description.

  The Protagonist recalls this whole adventure many, many years later, when he has already become the Archbishop of Canterbury and is very highly respected in the religious world.

  SUBTOTAL chapter 7: 5 pages

  TOTAL BOOK: 80 pages

  THE END OF PANDORA IN THE CONGO

  DON’T STRAY FROM THE OUTLINE!

  DON’T SCRIMP ON THE ADJECTIVES!

  DON’T FORGET THE DEADLINES!

  When I remember the days that followed I can’t believe my own naïveté. I was very young. And the idea of being published filled me with awe. The fact that my name wouldn’t appear on the books, the fact that they were paperbacks, none of that mattered much. If Doctor Flag didn’t like the book, it would be Frank Strub and his three children that paid the price. And I didn’t want my literary flights of fancy to harm a poor family.

  In terms of the plot, I offer no comment. Pandora in the Congo was Doctor Flag’s typical rubbish. But, as I said, bad or good, we are talking about my first book, and I was prepared to toil away at it. I wanted to do my research conscientiously and I had locked myself away in a public library. After three days of study I had arrived at few conclusions, but they were irrefutable ones:

  the pygmies were not cannibals;

  there are no lions in the jungle;

  what in the hell was the Spore Theory?

  In the name of fiction, and with some very flexible literary licence, I could allow the protagonist to tame a lion. Or have an entire Roman legion get lost below the Nile. As far as the pygmies go, I had never questioned that they belonged to the human race. The worst of it was that all the ethnographic evidence agreed they were the most affable and anarchistic society in the world. How could they create an empire? So, Flag’s pygmies didn’t exist. And without hordes of man-eating pygmies there was no book. But I didn’t dare alter an outline by the Doctor Luther Flag. So that very same evening I went to visit Frank to explain the problem to him.
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  It was very late and I already regretted having rung the bell when he opened the door. Frank received me in a vest and long johns, that ridiculous underwear we all wore before the Great War. At first he smiled. But when he found out why I was there his face changed. ‘I thought you were coming to give me the novel, finished and polished!’ he said from the doorway.

  ‘But there are no lions in the jungle, Frank …’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘Lions? What lions? Of course there are lions in the jungle! If Doctor Flag says there are lions in the jungle, then there are! And that’s it! If a Roman legion can’t find its way back, why can’t a fucking lion get lost? Or do lions carry compasses?’

  ‘But Frank, pygmies aren’t cannibals …’

  ‘Who the hell cares if pygmies aren’t cannibals!’ he cut me off. ‘Have you lost your mind, Tommy? You want Flag to string me up? He could take me to court. He could accuse me of anything, if he put his mind to it. Even plagiarism.’