Pandora in the Congo Read online

  Sixty years later it makes me want to laugh: Flag, the cemetery, the opera buffa it all turned into. And yet, then, as I crossed the cemetery grounds, I didn’t find it amusing in the least. I was like some sort of cauldron in which all human indignation boiled. I was no more than twenty paces away when someone said to me, ‘Excuse me. This is yours.’

  At first I didn’t pay any attention to him. He was one of those men who have nothing striking about them, radically bland. He dressed with discreet elegance and might have been born bald; his was a complete baldness, as perfect as a full moon. His facial features, very clean, brought to mind portraits of the young Nietzsche. But that was it. That and a small moustache below his nose, thin as a sideburn.

  He must have been following me, because he offered me a pack of papers bound with twine. I didn’t even remember that that whole ill-fated day had started because of Flag. I held out my hands, stunned and apathetic, because what I had written didn’t mean a thing to me anymore. The man smiled.

  ‘Have you ever been in an automobile? I can take you wherever you like.’

  No, I had never been in an automobile before. And the emotions of the day had made me very receptive to any assistance, as unexpected as it might be. I sat next to the driver without saying a word. My throat was parched. The man pulled a small flask of whisky out of the glove compartment, and I took a swig.

  Haltingly, I explained it all to him. My dealings with Frank Strub. The ridiculous stories that I wrote. The disgraceful exploitation I endured. The chain of absurd events that culminated with me. With each sip from the flask I broached a new topic. When the cauldron stopped boiling I felt a little more calm. What was I doing there, inside an automobile, relating my life to a perfect stranger?

  I noticed the hands that guided the steering wheel. No one can hide the age of their hands. And my good Samaritan was younger than he seemed. He had nails as pink as flamingos that sank deep into his flesh. His baldness and his moustache were deceiving. His clothes, classically cut, were too. His air of respectability added years, perhaps on purpose. I felt uncomfortable. For the first time it occurred to me that he knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him. I begged him to drop me off right there, we were now very close to the centre of the city. He told me that he was in no hurry. The dead man had been a very distant friend. He had gone to the burial out of obligation, so he had the whole morning free. But I insisted. When I got out of the vehicle, he gave me his card. It read: ‘Edward Norton. Barrister.’

  ‘I’d like to see you again, Mr Thomson,’ he said from inside the car. ‘It is possible that our interests complement each other. Come to see me tomorrow, please.’

  ‘Do you think I would consider suing Luther Flag? His type always wins cases. And I can’t afford a legal bill.’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he laughed. ‘I want to talk to you about something very different. Come tomorrow at around half past eight. My address is on the card.’

  We said goodbye. But I didn’t have time to get very far.

  ‘Thomson!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve left something. It’s the second time you’ve lost it today.’ And once again he gave me the package that contained the novella and the three copies. ‘I was very amused by your outburst earlier, with Doctor Flag.’ And he added, ‘I’m looking for a man with passion. See you tomorrow.’

  In London in 1914 there were very few automobiles. As I crossed Trafalgar Square an open-topped Rolls-Royce passed, driven by a man with white gloves. Behind him sat an adorable old man, with both hands on a cane with an ivory knob. The vehicle stopped at the junction to let a carriage pass. I took advantage of the pause to throw the package of pages at Flag’s skull while shouting, ‘That’s yours!’

  It struck him right on the nape of the neck, as precisely as if I had thrown a rock. I hope it really hurt.

  TWO

  AT THAT TIME I was living in a rented room in a modest neighbourhood, a place where humans and mice fought an unresolved war. A century earlier the building had been a well-to-do residence. The baroque ornamentation on the façade and the two staircases, one for the masters of the house and the other for servants, spoke of a splendid past. But the umpteenth expansion of the outskirts of London had absorbed the building. This proud country home was now deep within the urban fabric of the British capital. It was Royal Steel’s fault, a company devoted to manufacturing locomotives and railway materials. A factory had been built very close by, and around it had sprung up blocks of cheap housing. The grazing pastures and fields of beets vanished, the land lost value, and the rich moved out. When I arrived there the building stood like a haggard relic, an island amidst a red brick sea.

  I explain all that because without knowing the history of the house it would be impossible to understand Mrs Pinkerton’s personality. She was the owner and she had been forced to convert it into a boarding house. My God, it all happened a lifetime ago and yet I still get the shivers when I hear the name Pinkerton.

  She was a thin, stiff woman, her back always as straight and tight as a pipe. I have never seen a chin so arrogant, always held high, as if pulled by an invisible hook. She had a rabbit’s expression, constantly mulling things over and sniffing about but without any real focus. Her clothes repulsed me. Black shoes, black stockings, black shawl, black coats. A coconut-shaped bun, also black. It’s not that she was especially pale, but she only wore black clothes and the inevitable contrast made her face resemble an ivory mask. She wasn’t in mourning (I think she was only sad the day Queen Victoria died), she wore black because it was the only colour she could stand. I soon grasped that what really irked her was that the rest of humanity wasn’t as bitter as she was. And since I couldn’t like anything about her, I at least tried to hate her the same way scientists hate viruses: dispassionately. My efforts were not very successful.

  I was one of the lodgers who had been there the longest and, to save myself a few pennies, we had an arrangement in which I would take care of little tasks around the house. Call the plumber when the pipes got clogged, distribute the mail to the rooms, pick up the bottles of milk at the door. Things like that. But having a conversation with Pinkerton was like struggling through a forest of cacti. What drove me mad were her dialectical ambushes. Pinkerton never attacked at close range with a bayonet, but rather like naval artillery bombing from miles away. She was unable, for example, to say, ‘Mr Thomson, why is the letterbox full?’ or ‘Mr Thomson, the tap’s leaking.’ Or ‘Mr Thomson, where is the milk?’

  I assure you I would have appreciated the direct approach. Instead, she would say, ‘Someone’s forgetting his weekly obligations.’

  My brain circuits then had to make a triple effort, asking: A: Who might that ‘someone’ be? B: What ‘obligation’ has been overlooked? C: For the love of God, why can’t she speak clearly?

  It all sounds petty, but it wasn’t. There are very subtle methods of torture. Imagine eyes that only look for faults. Ears that only hear blasphemies. Someone with whom it was impossible to have a trivial, relaxed conversation. Every time she opened her mouth I was forced to be on guard, to sense where she would attack me. I always had to be thinking about what she might be thinking, and it was exhausting. We were like professional chess players, each one trying to predict the other’s plan five or six moves in advance.

  Another example: it took me months to work out that she hated to be called ‘Miss’. She never told me, but I deduced it from the symptoms. Each time she heard the word ‘Miss’, her chin lifted higher and higher, and her gaze was so high that more than once I wondered if there was a leak in the ceiling. No. It was just that she didn’t like being reminded that she didn’t have a husband. One day I tested my theory, calling her Mrs Pinkerton instead of Miss, as if there were an imaginary Mr Pinkerton, and the invisible tension around her lessened. At least slightly.

  The fact that a coal-black scarecrow like Mrs Pinkerton was unmarried shows that the male of the species is sharper than some women think. Without a m
an, and therefore without children, she would have liked to be one of those fancy governesses that raise the Kaiser’s children. But she wasn’t. She was just a landlady in a poor neighbourhood, and her frustration couldn’t be measured in rational terms. She confused love with etiquette, and her biggest anxiety in life was the fear of arriving late to her own funeral.

  Besides the landlady, the other permanent member of the house was Marie Antoinette. That was her name, just like the decapitated French queen. She belonged to Mrs Pinkerton and she was a turtle, the most perverse and unusual turtle that has ever existed. She was either born without a shell or had survived its loss, I don’t know which. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some intolerant lodger had broken it with whacks of his hammer. And that’s because Marie Antoinette had a very bad temper. Any pet, even a parakeet, is able to understand some basic commands: ‘Lie down’, ‘Shut up’, ‘Get out’, etcetera. With Marie Antoinette it was just the opposite: she took for granted that humans were the ones who should obey her.

  A turtle without a shell is a very strange thing. Even with shells, turtles are very strange things, with their miniature elephant’s feet, parrot’s beak and ludicrous tail. Marie Antoinette was disgusting to look at, thinner than a sausage. She had nowhere to hide her head, so her haughty reaction was to carry it constantly in the air like a periscope, daring humans to be brave enough to criticise her monstrousness on parade. Because Marie Antoinette never sat still, and when she moved she looked like an epileptic swimmer. It was impossible to get used to a turtle that ran like a beetle, freed from the ballast of her shell. Suddenly you’d notice a fleeting shadow stuck to the wall or coming round a corner. Marie Antoinette hated anyone that looked at her with repulsion. Which is to say: everyone in general and Tommy Thomson in particular.

  But enough about Marie Antoinette. What I found truly incomprehensible was the odd relationship that Pinkerton had with Mr MacMahon. Even though he had a Scottish surname, he was Irish. There are all sorts of prejudices about the Irish being drunks, jokers and shoddy workers, and while I’m aware that a writer has to avoid such stereotyping, that’s exactly how MacMahon was. Catholic, the father of seven children (or eight, I don’t remember), always joking and whose manners, especially at the table, would have scandalised pirates.

  He moved into the boarding house shortly after I did. His biceps were slightly softened by age, but as thick as Canadian logs. His hair was short, a sailor’s cut, and dense as a brush. He had come to London, like so many of his fellow countrymen, in search of a more respectable wage. I didn’t think he would last a week, that Pinkerton would either have him locked up in jail or sent straight to the madhouse.

  He worked from sun-up till sundown at Royal Steel. He came home late at night, dirty and with his face black. You could tell he was home by the trail of soot you could follow through the hallway. I remember Pinkerton’s expression the first time she saw it. It was reminiscent of a biologist following the tracks of an unknown species: perhaps some kind of snail that weighed a ton and left slimy tar in its wake. Pinkerton advanced along the corridor with her body bent in an inverted L, unable to believe her eyes, until she came up against the door to MacMahon’s room. What a fright! She looked like Martha turned into a statue of salt. Black salt, in her case.

  That evening I had to stifle my laughter; she, her tears. The other lodgers had already eaten when MacMahon came to the table. He served himself food while sucking snot back up his nose, coughing, sneezing and clearing his throat as if he had whalebones stuck in it. Mr MacMahon didn’t eat, he swallowed potatoes like a crocodile would zebra meat. And he had the distinction of doing it along with five other simultaneous operations: chewing, guzzling, gobbling, talking and singing.

  At that time there were few lodgers, two or three, and they were very boring. We hardly spoke because we had little to say to each other. MacMahon interpreted that in his own way.

  ‘Are you sad, maybe?’ he said happily. ‘I’ll sing you an Irish song.’

  And he sang us a cheerful Irish song. I don’t know that it was very successful, but I can assure you that it did warrant a change in Pinkerton’s face, from vanilla white to artichoke green.

  On Sunday mornings he liked to stroll through the house barefoot, with trousers and leather braces. And nothing else. You could see him in the small lounge. A place filled with armchairs, bad paintings of Pinkerton forefathers and an old piano that hadn’t been played for three decades. MacMahon took the liberty of converting the lounge into some sort of workshop. He repaired any domestic device that had broken or damaged. Sewing machines, locks, bookcases, shoes. He did it willingly and we saved a few shillings, so Pinkerton didn’t dare complain. He spent his days off there, singing and working half-naked, scratching his chest and his big round belly that was as hairy as his chest. For Pinkerton that Sunday show was the closest she had ever seen to a Roman orgy.

  He was a practical man. He was also very thick-skinned. I think that there must be rocks in the Kalahari desert more sensitive than Mr MacMahon. One day he asked me for one of my Doctor Flag novellas. I lent him a copy, curious as to what criteria he would use to judge it.

  ‘Thanks, Tommy,’ he told me three days later when he returned it. ‘I fixed the leg of the bed. It was a little wobbly and the Bible was too thick.’

  On another occasion he had to go to Ireland to get some papers. He left the telegram that he had sent his wife on a table. It read: ‘Next week I’m coming on the ferry STOP take a bath STOP.’

  But the worst thing about Mr MacMahon was his farts. They erupted as the evening turned to night, behind his door, and they could be heard throughout the entire floor and half the building.

  After living with MacMahon I came to the conclusion that he was the inventor of five types of farts. One of them I baptised Big Ben farts, precisely spaced out, as if marking the hours. Poom, pause, poom, pause, and on and on until midnight. Another kind were the Vickers farts, which were less loud but had the cadence of a machine-gun. Their main trait was that they had no quantitative limit. They could be ten, twenty or thirty. They all made exactly the same sound, MacMahon controlled the dilation of his sphincter and the dose of gas perfectly. Sometimes, though, MacMahon lost control and his farts sounded like a flock of wild ducks, quack, quack, quack. The fourth kind was the Violin fart: thinner, longer, like a kitten that meows because it’s lost its mother. Those ones really got on my nerves. The fifth type, well, those were Doctor Flag farts. I gave them that name because of one of Doctor Flag’s novellas, in which some sort of widespread flood throughout Africa was meant to redeem the continent from paganism. It began with a large thunderclap; just one, but an omnipotent one.

  There was no escaping the surprise attacks of Doctor Flag farts. When a Doctor Flag fart erupted it woke everyone in the house, and there was no way we could get back to sleep. They were like bombs, bombs of a calibre that in 1914 no military engineer had yet dreamed up. An earthquake that made us open our eyes and, bewildered, look up at the ceiling beams in horror. Of all the lodgers I was the only one that was close enough to him to be able to talk to him about the problem, even discreetly. His reply? ‘Better out than in.’

  Why didn’t Mrs Pinkerton kick him out? Good question. What most surprised me was that with him she didn’t employ any of her characteristic torture techniques, not by a long shot. She maintained a totally neutral attitude. Pinkerton looked at Mr MacMahon with silent, attentive and resolute eyes. An expression that could say it all or not mean anything. Without getting involved, without expressing an opinion.

  He disconcerted her, I think. Somehow she understood that her sophisticated malice would have been useless against MacMahon, who was too crude to comprehend it. As annoying as a mosquito can be, it will never get through an elephant’s hide. It is also possible that MacMahon awakened mixed emotions in her. As I mentioned, Pinkerton was a bankrupt middle-class woman. She fled from the working class like typhus. But in MacMahon working- class values and bourgeois urbani
ty combined in a very strange way.

  An example: when one of those horrible Irish swearwords slipped out, he always added a very polite ‘Excuse me, Mrs Pinkerton’. And another: on Sundays he went around half-naked, yes, but only after coming back from mass. And no one could question that he took his responsibility as a father seriously: he worked like a mule and sent all of his salary to Ireland.

  It’s also true that that same man had his thoughtful gestures. After mass, Mr MacMahon always came home with a bouquet of flowers for Mrs Pinkerton.

  ‘You should put soap in the water,’ said MacMahon. ‘The flowers will last longer.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’ve been told bicarbonate of soda is more effective.’

  ‘Bicarbonate of soda instead of soap? Hmm … let’s test it out.’

  When they were together they had a unique ability to turn any topic of conversation, even flowers, into a technical question. They sat in front of the vase, staring at it like people waiting to see a tree grow, and they would spend whole hours there discussing whether it was better to add soap or bicarbonate of soda. To someone who didn’t know them the scene would have seemed absurd. Pinkerton had the perverse ability to use up all the oxygen in a room. But MacMahon pumped out double, so they established some sort of homeostatic equilibrium.

  There was still the farting issue. But, when you think about it, MacMahon only farted in his own room. The right to privacy is one of the great victories of modern culture. Why can’t a man fart in his own room? In his own room, a man has the right to fart and the right to cry. At the beginning of the month, when he got paid, he got drunk. It was the only special expense that he allowed himself. We would hear him cry all night long when he drank. He recited the names of his wife and of his seven or eight children, between sobs and whimpers. Once this prompted one of those typically twisted, exasperating dialogues with Mrs Pinkerton. She said to me: ‘Mr MacMahon is crying.’