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

were confused. He’s always been slippery in political matters. Perhaps, as an assimilated British citizen, he doesn’t feel very secure. On the other hand, as a Pole, he hates Germany as much as Russia, both of which made his country disappear for so many centuries. In short, I don’t know. All your friends regret this very much. One can be a great writer and a coward in political matters. You know that better than anyone, Roger.”
    Roger agreed. He regretted having asked the question. It would have been better not to know. The absence of that signature would torment him now just as it had tormented him to learn from his lawyer, Gavan Duffy, that Edmund D. Morel had not wanted to sign the petition for a commutation of his sentence either. His friend, his brother Bulldog! His companion in the struggle to assist the natives of the Congo also refused, claiming reasons of patriotic loyalty in wartime.
    “Conrad’s not having signed won’t change things very much,” said the historian. “His political influence with the Asquith government is nil.”
    “No, of course not,” Roger agreed.
    Perhaps it had no importance in the success or failure of the petition, but for him, in his heart of hearts, it did. It would have done him good to recall, in the fits of despair that assailed him in his cell, that a person of Conrad’s prestige, admired by so many people—himself included—had helped at this critical moment and sent him, with his signature, a message of understanding and friendship.
    “You met him a long time ago, didn’t you?” Alice asked, as if reading his thoughts.
    “Twenty-six years ago exactly. In June 1890, in the Congo,” Roger specified. “He wasn’t a writer yet. Though, if I remember correctly, he told me he had begun a novel. No doubt it was Almayer’s Folly , the first one he published. He sent it to me, with a dedication. I still have the book somewhere. He hadn’t published anything yet. He was a sailor. You could barely understand his English, his Polish accent was so thick.”
    “You still can’t understand him,” Alice said with a smile. “He still speaks English with that awful accent. As if he were ‘chewing pebbles,’ as Bernard Shaw says. But he writes it like an angel, whether we like him or not.”
    Roger recalled the day in June 1890 when, perspiring in the humid heat and bothered by the bites of mosquitoes gorging on his foreigner’s skin, the young captain in the British merchant fleet arrived in Matadi. About thirty, with a high forehead, deep black beard, robust body, and deep-set eyes, his name was Konrad Korzeniowski, a Pole who had become a British citizen a few years earlier. Contracted by the Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, he came to serve as captain of one of the small steamboats that carried goods and merchants back and forth between Leopoldville–Kinshasa and the distant cataracts of Stanley Falls in Kisangani. It was his first position as a ship’s captain, and he was filled with hopes and projects. He arrived in the Congo imbued with all the fantasies and myths used by Leopold II to create the image of a great humanitarian, a monarch determined to civilize Africa and free the Congolese from slavery, paganism, and other barbarities. In spite of his long experience sailing the seas of Asia and the Americas, his gift for languages, and his readings, there was something innocent and childlike in the Pole that charmed Roger immediately. The feeling was mutual, for from the day they met until three weeks later, when Korzeniowski left in the company of thirty porters on the caravan route to Leopoldville–Kinshasa, where he would take command of his ship Le roi des Belges , they saw each other morning, noon, and night.
    They went for excursions in the environs of Matadi, as far as the now nonexistent Vivi, the first, transitory capital of the colony of which not even the rubble remained, and the mouth of the Mpozo River where, according to