Pandora in the Congo Read online

  Behind one of the house’s windows a light went on. Frank saw it and got even more worked up, ‘Now look what you’ve made me do! The children are awake. Do you want them to have to sleep under a bridge? Is that what you want, Tommy? You want to destroy an entire family?’

  ‘No, Frank, of course not …’

  ‘Then go home and write the damn novel! Three days more, Tommy, three days and I want it here, typed and in triplicate. And now get out of here! And use new ribbons or the carbon paper won’t make the third copy dark enough.’

  Before closing the door he lowered his voice. But even now, more than sixty years later, I can still hear what he said: ‘Who do you think you are, Tommy? A scientist? A philosopher? You’re a writer now, Tommy, a bloody writer.’

  What did I do? I went home and I wrote pandora in the congo in three days and two nights. Strub hadn’t even given me the chance to ask him what the Spore Theory was.

  In the beginning I said this story began with three burials, and the deaths are still nowhere to be seen. But that’s because this story still hasn’t begun. I just explained all that to put my job in its proper place. In other words: if anyone thought that working as a ghost writer had its charm, I hope I have burst that bubble.

  After Pandora in the Congo there were many similar little novels. They were all as abominable as that one, some more so. I know, it’s hard to believe, but yes, there were worse.

  The structure was always the same. Deliriously patriotic: the British explorers were glorious; the French, pedantic; the Italians, mannered; the Portuguese, primitive. Biblically militaristic: the vast majority of the protagonists were either missionaries or soldiers, sometimes both at once: army chaplains. And with a level of racism that was reactionary even for its time. All the African characters fitted into one of two categories: noble savages or savage cannibals. The former could aspire to becoming submissive servants, with an intelligence that never went beyond that of an eight-year-old. And as for the others, let’s just say I’d rather forget about them.

  In terms of my income, I had no complaints. It’s true that Frank paid me little, very little. Old Flag shamelessly exploited Frank. And since I was the ghost writer of a ghost writer, I had to accept double exploitation. I didn’t argue about Frank taking a part of my hypothetical profits. Otherwise, what would be the point of him hiring me? And besides, I could understand his situation as the father of a large family.

  But one day Frank didn’t show up for our meeting. We usually got together in a small pub where we exchanged material. I would hand in the novella I had written and he would give me the outline for the next one. It was in both of our best interests to be punctual, so after waiting forty-five minutes I was feeling perplexed. Only a situation of force majeure could explain Frank’s absence. I thought he must have been ill, or one of his children must have had the chickenpox, or all three of his children at once, so I decided to go to his house.

  The woman who opened the door was Negro. I was surprised that Frank was married to a Negro woman. In 1914 mixed-race couples were very rare, but then I thought maybe his fondness for Africa had come from his marriage. The woman was a bundle of nerves, and all she said was, ‘You’re a friend of Frank’s? Please, come in!’

  She led me to the bedroom as quickly as she could and pointed to the bed.

  The reason why Frank hadn’t showed up definitely fell under force majeure: he was dead. He had one eye open and the other closed, as if he were winking at eternity. As I said before, Frank wasn’t in my circle of close friends, but everyone gets emotional in the face of something like that.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Strub! I’m so sorry!’ I exclaimed, and I hugged her like a sister. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help you or your three children, don’t hesitate to ask for anything, anything, really. Poor Frank! The poor bastard!’

  But the woman frowned, and I suddenly realised that my words had struck the wrong chord.

  ‘What children?’ the Negro woman asked me. ‘As far as I know, Frank doesn’t have any children. He’s single.’ And right away she corrected herself, ‘He was single.’

  I didn’t get it at all. I took a step back.

  ‘Single? Then who am I talking to?’

  ‘We had an agreement. On Thursday nights we slept together. Today I woke up and he was dead.’ She said all that while avoiding my eyes. Then all of a sudden her tone became more lively. ‘I think I’ve seen you before. Aren’t you the young man who knocked on the door one evening? I saw you through the window.’

  At that point Luther Flag’s literary production was written almost entirely by me. I had perfected the system and I was able to write three novellas a week. In fact, I often started them even before I got the outlines. All Frank did was correct the punctuation (I’ve never been good with full stops and commas, much less with semicolons), fix those paragraphs where the characters weren’t patriotic enough, and censure those where the Negroes were too intelligent.

  Disoriented, I sat in a chair with my hat in my hands. I looked at the bed and I thought about a lot of things, or perhaps about nothing at all. I don’t remember anymore.

  ‘What a great writer the world is losing!’ said the woman, now more contrite.

  ‘Yes, a great writer…’ I said with a hollow voice.

  ‘Do you know Doctor Flag?’ she asked me, more cheerfully. She had a rather fickle personality.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him,’ I said, barely listening to her.

  ‘Do you want to know something? It would appear that Doctor Flag doesn’t write his own books!’ She laughed, even more gleefully.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and do you know the funniest part?’

  ‘Let me guess. That Frank wrote Doctor Flag’s novels?’

  ‘No! That’s funny, but just a little bit. The best part is that Doctor Flag thinks that Mr Spencer writes them!’

  I flinched. ‘And who is Mr Spencer?’

  ‘The man who gives Frank the outlines. Mr Spencer was Doctor Flag’s ghost writer until one day he suggested to Frank that he write them, the novels. Ever since then, all Spencer did was pass Doctor Flag’s outlines to poor Frank.’

  She became melancholy once again. ‘Poor Frank. Anyone can write an outline. What really counts is writing the novel, don’t you think?’ And more indignantly, ‘That Spencer had some cheek! I always said that to him, to poor Frank …’

  I asked her to give me this Spencer’s address. I put on my hat; she saw that I was leaving and pointed to the bed.

  ‘And what do I do with Frank now? You said you would help me, didn’t you?’

  But I was thinking about all the commissions that Frank Strub had pocketed at my expense, when all he was doing was acting as the intermediary between me and this man Spencer, and I said, ‘I think, miss, that I’ve already helped enough.’

  The woman held me for a moment by the elbow. Perhaps she had worked out who I was and what I was doing there. In the tone of someone confirming a suspicion she said, ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’

  I don’t know why, but I felt like a criminal caught red-handed.

  ‘Yes, and you, miss, are a prostitute,’ I said.

  The two accusations balanced each other out and I headed off. To Mr Spencer’s house. I was sure that this Spencer would be the first one interested in replacing Frank Strub. Really, when you took a good look at it, all we had to do was make our already existing relationship official. I was expecting, naturally, that once freed from the surcharge added by Strub’s mediation, my profits would increase.

  There was nobody in. A neighbour leaning on the iron railing separating the two small gardens in front of the houses saw me. He pointed at me with his finger and said, ‘Are you here to offer your condolences to the Spencer family? You’d better hurry up! The funeral procession left for the cemetery ten minutes ago.’

  Spencer was dead too! The neighbour told me the details: that morning he had been run over by a tram. Its wheels had split his body into
two halves, like a motorised guillotine.

  What could I do? I went to the cemetery; I had nothing to lose. I was hoping to find someone there who knew about Spencer’s business, so I could explain who I was and they would recommend me to Flag. The truth is I wasn’t at all sure what I was going there to do. But I went anyway.

  I had no trouble locating Spencer’s funeral. Among the tombstones that stuck out of the grass, I saw a ring of people congregated around a pastor who read from the Bible and mentioned the deceased. A fat man, with red cheeks and a short neck, was standing amongst the last row of attendees. He was so short that in order to see anything he had to hop up every once in a while, lifting himself above the heads of the mourners in front of him. I approached him.

  ‘What a shame, what a stupid accident,’ I whispered as a conversation starter. ‘Death always takes the good ones.’

  ‘Spencer? One of the good ones? Spencer was a right bastard. I’m here to collect a debt.’

  I was surprised when he started laughing softly. ‘They say the embalmers had a lot of problems.’

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘Well, Spencer wasn’t the only one killed by the tram. The wheels cut two men in half at the waist, Spencer and some other bloke. Since they had very similar trousers on, now they don’t know if they’re burying him with his own legs or the other bloke’s.’

  He had to cover his mouth with his hand to hold back his laughter. I thought aloud, ‘What a coincidence…’

  ‘Not really. You could say it was an on-thejob accident. Spencer was a writer, and the other man was giving him the instructions to write one of his books.’

  ‘The literary outline?’

  ‘Hmm, yes, whatever it’s called. Outline, instructions, guide, who cares? They were distracted for a minute and wham! Well, damn it, that’s life.’

  ‘And how do you know all this?’

  ‘Because he told me himself. I lent him some money, on the condition that he return it the next month with interest, when he had been paid for the three books he was writing. Imagine that! He was writing three books at once! But in order to write them he needed an instruction manual.’

  ‘And how do you know so many details about the accident?’

  ‘Because I was there. I had been following him around for weeks trying to collect the debt, I knew everything about his life. Spencer and the other man said goodbye after having exchanged the usual papers. I saw how the tram cut them into two pieces. Four pieces, to be precise.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘But I have a debt to collect and as God is my witness I am going to collect it …’

  I had a revelation. I squeezed the fat man’s sleeve so hard that he looked at me as if he was afraid I was going to hurt him.

  ‘Who was the other man who died?’ I exclaimed. ‘Doctor Flag?’

  ‘Doctor Luther Flag! Please! Obviously not!’ said the man. ‘Doctor Flag is a great writer. For the love of God! I don’t know what the hell Spencer wrote, but if he could write as well as Doctor Flag, he wouldn’t be in debt.’ He came a bit closer to me, ‘Do you know Doctor Flag’s work?’

  I looked at the clouds and thought out loud, ‘So, if the other dead man wasn’t Flag, who was he?’

  ‘I have the complete collection of Doctor Flag’s work. Everything except for one from April 1899, which has sold out. You wouldn’t happen to have it, would you? I’m willing to pay a reasonable price.’ And he began, ‘A Spanish regiment from Cuba is sent after a boat filled with mutinous slaves. The Negroes have seized the ship and they go back to Africa. But the Spanish regiment perseveres, following them deep into the jungle. There there’s a great pitched battle between the tribe of Africans and the Spanish regiment.’

  I came to the only possible conclusion: that Spencer was nothing more than another Frank Strub. Spencer just got the outlines, which he quickly turned over to Frank, and then Frank to me. So, above Spencer there was yet another man. A man who got the outlines directly from Flag. And that man was also dead. Beneath the wheels of the same tram as Spencer.

  ‘In the midst of the battle, an English missionary arrives, who tells both sides that Cuba has been freed by the Americans and that slavery has been abolished. The battle is absurd!’

  The man was becoming tedious. I couldn’t think with all his talk.

  ‘But what regiment are you talking about?’ I growled. ‘Where does this war between African tribes and Cuban Spaniards come from?’

  ‘It’s the plot of the book I’m missing. Do you remember it? If you remember it, it’s because you’ve read it, and if you’ve read it, you might still have it at home. I’m open to offers. Ten shillings? I’m willing to negotiate.’

  There was nothing more I could do there. I left with my head bowed, ruminating. I felt like I had been defeated, even though I didn’t really know by whom.

  I was just about out of the cemetery when I ran into another burial. Funerals are all alike. A circle of weeping people; a pastor that laments the death and praises the defunct. I didn’t want to stop, but I heard the words ‘tram’ and ‘accident’.

  It was obviously the other victim. The third and last individual who came between Flag and me. And among those attending the ceremony, in the first row, was a man whose hair was whiter than snow.

  In the photograph on the back covers one couldn’t make out the red nose furrowed with very, very thin purple veins. Or that he limped with his right foot. But it was him. It was Doctor Luther Flag, indubitably. He had gone to the burial of his ghost writer. The overseer of his ghost writers, to be more precise.

  Suddenly I remembered the outlines, or should I say the extra commentary. I have to say that the notes in Pandora in the Congo were extremely kind compared to the ones in other outlines. In some outlines he had gone so far as to describe his ghost writer as a literary leper, or an illiterate gypsy, or accuse him of adjectival genocide. I also thought that, even though he didn’t know it, the ghost writer to whom he had directed his contempt on the recent outlines was none other than me. I didn’t know Flag personally yet, but I was pretty damn sure he would not be going down in history as the Abraham Lincoln of the literary slaves.

  I waited for the ceremony to end before approaching him. When the people were already scattered I moved towards him. He was looking at me suspiciously from the very start. I offered him my hand. His rested on a cane with a white knob. He had no intention of shaking my hand. He looked at it, assessing the possibility that I would infect him with some contagious skin disease. All his suspicions were hidden behind a sweet voice that spoke as if we were far away from each other.

  ‘Have I had the honour of meeting you, young man?’

  ‘Indirectly, sir,’ I said cheerfully, ‘I’m the ghost writer of the ghost writer of the ghost writer of your ghost writer.’

  It was a big mistake. Flag didn’t realise we had common interests, that I was only offering myself to replace those fallen in combat. There were still other people around. Flag must have thought that perhaps they had heard me and my words brought his honour into question. Or perhaps he was irascible by nature. Or perhaps he wasn’t even aware of the whole delegated industry his books had generated, the last link of which was my humble self. But he half-opened his mouth, indecisively. Beneath the man’s chin extended a generous double one that inflated like that of a pelican gulping down a tuna. His cheeks turned the colour of a pumpkin, and his nose got even redder. And when his entire face was boiling like a laboratory tube, when the effervescence of colours made me scared his skull would explode, just then he spat out, ‘I don’t know you, nor do I have the slightest interest in knowing you! And if I were twenty years younger, I would challenge you to a duel!’

  He raised his mahogany cane but before it hit me, I grabbed the end. Old Flag momentarily forgot about the noble cause of murdering me. Now we fought for control of the cane, each of us pulling on one end. We looked like two children playing tug-of-war.

  ‘Let go of my cane!’ he said. ‘Let it go!’

 
‘But you attacked me!’ I wanted to calm him down.

  ‘Get out of here! You are an Arab extortionist! A Pharisee! A wingless beetle! Let go of my cane!’

  What a pathetic scene. But those insults broke the dam of my tolerance. I was an architect with a chimneysweep’s salary. And Flag was to blame for my indigence. He hid behind a name earned by the sweat of countless ghost writers, all as anonymous and poorly paid as I had been. And that apostle of sewer literature was spewing more insults at me than even the wise men of Zion had had to put up with. I retaliated with an even stronger tug.

  ‘And you are an old drunkard, a miserable usurer, a Pharonic impostor!’

  ‘How dare you slander me!’ he replied, pulling even harder. ‘My work has inspired twenty-five graduating classes of British officers!’

  ‘Maybe that’s why the Zulus massacred the English army at Isaldwana! And the Sudanese at Khartoum! And the Boers in South Africa! Now I understand all our disasters abroad!’

  ‘Let go of my cane! It was a personal gift from the Emperor of Munhumutapa! Get out of here, you opportunistic mercenary!’

  ‘Opportunistic mercenary? Me? You are an ambassador of literary bad taste! And a word pimp! Take your bastard cane! You can keep it!’

  All I did was open my hands. But because of all the accumulated force, Flag fell on his arse and rolled around on the ground. He looked like a turtle on its back. Hearing our skirmish, the funeral goers, who were already scattered, had gathered to watch us up close. A fan tried to lift him up by the elbow, a woman knelt down and dried his forehead with a handkerchief. Everyone there, it goes without saying, was on Flag’s side.

  The crowd shouted at me as if I were a criminal stepping up to the gallows. I felt completely out of sorts. I was very young, and youth is when one is most susceptible to discrimination. But what could I do? Everyone hated me and nothing I said would improve matters. I felt my cheeks burning hot, my ears must have been red as peppers. I smoothed my trousers with my hands with as much dignity as I could, picked up my hat, and took my leave.