The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I’m doing something I shouldn’t do, darling,” said Alice, forcing a smile. “Giving you only the bad news, the pessimistic view.”

  “Can there be any other after what has happened?”

  “Yes, there is,” the historian declared in a resolute voice, blushing. “I was also against the rising, in these circumstances. And yet …”

  “And yet what, Alice?”

  “For a few hours, a few days, an entire week, Ireland was a free country, darling,” she said, and it seemed to Roger that Alice trembled with emotion. “An independent, sovereign republic, with a president and a provisional government. Austin hadn’t arrived yet when Patrick Pearse came out of the Post Office and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the creation of the constitutional government of the Republic of Ireland, signed by the seven. There weren’t many people there, it seems. Those who were and heard him must have felt something very special, don’t you agree, darling? I was opposed, as I’ve told you. But when I read that text I began to cry aloud, in a way I’ve never cried before. ‘In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom …’ You see, I’ve memorized it. And I’ve regretted with all my strength not having been there with them. You understand, don’t you?”

  Roger closed his eyes. He saw the scene, clear and vibrant. In front of the General Post Office, under an overcast sky that threatened rain, before a hundred or two hundred people armed with shotguns, revolvers, knives, pikes, cudgels, most of them men but also a good number of women in kerchiefs, rose the slender, graceful, sickly figure of Patrick Pearse, with his thirty-six years and his steely gaze, filled with a Nietzschean “will to power” that had always allowed him, especially from the time he was seventeen, joined the Gaelic League, and soon became its indisputable leader, to rise above every misfortune, sickness, repression, internal struggle, and give material form to his life’s mystic dream—the armed uprising of the Irish against the oppressor, the martyrdom of the saints that would redeem an entire people—reading, in the messianic voice that the emotion of the moment magnified, the carefully chosen words that brought to a close centuries of occupation and servitude and initiated a new era in the history of Ireland. He listened to the religious, sacred silence that Pearse’s words must have created in that corner of the center of Dublin, still intact because the shooting hadn’t begun yet, and he saw the faces of the Volunteers who looked out from the windows of the Post Office and nearby buildings on Sackville Street taken by the rebels, to contemplate the simple, solemn ceremony. He listened to the clamor, the applause, the long-lives, the hurrahs with which, when the reading of the seven names that signed the Proclamation had concluded, the words of Patrick Pearse were rewarded by the people on the street, at the windows, on the roofs, and the brevity and intensity of the moment when Pearse himself and the other leaders ended the celebration, explaining there was no time to lose. They had to return to their posts, fulfill their obligations, prepare to fight. He felt his eyes grow wet. He, too, had begun to tremble. In order not to cry, he said hurriedly:

  “It must have been very moving, of course.”

  “It’s a symbol and history is made of symbols,” Alice Stopford Green agreed. “It doesn’t matter that they shot Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Plunkett, and the rest of the signers of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. On the contrary. Those shootings have baptized this symbol with blood, giving it a halo of heroism and martyrdom.”

  “Exactly what Pearse and Plunkett wanted,” said Roger. “You’re right, Alice. I would have liked to be there with them too.”

  Just as she was inspired by the action outside the Post Office, Alice was moved that so many members of the rebel women’s organization, Cumann na mBan, had taken part in the uprising. The Capuchin monk had seen that with his own eyes. In all the rebel centers women were charged by the leaders to cook for the combatants, but then, as skirmishes broke out, the importance of the action opened the fan of responsibilities for the militants of Cumann na mBan, whom the shooting, bombs, and fires tore out of improvised kitchens and turned into nurses. They bandaged the wounded and helped surgeons remove bullets, suture wounds, and amputate limbs threatened with gangrene. But perhaps the most important role of those women—adolescents, adults, those approaching old age—had been as couriers when, because of the increasing isolation of the rebel barricades and posts, it was indispensable to turn to the cooks and nurses and send them on their bicycles and, when those became scarce, on foot, to fetch and carry messages, oral or written reports (with instructions to destroy, burn, or eat those papers if they were wounded or captured). Brother Austin assured Alice that for the six days of the rebellion, in the midst of bombings and gunfire, explosions that demolished roofs, walls, and balconies and transformed the center of Dublin into an archipelago of fires and mountains of scorched, bloodstained rubble, he never stopped seeing those angels in skirts, going and coming, grasping the handlebars like Amazons on their mounts and pedaling furiously, serene, heroic, intrepid, defying the bullets, carrying the messages and reports that broke the quarantine that the British Army tried strategically to impose on the rebels, isolating them before crushing them.

  “When they could no longer serve as couriers because troops were occupying the streets and traffic was impossible, many took the revolvers and rifles of their husbands, fathers, and brothers and fought as well,” said Alice. “Along with them, Constance Markievicz showed that not all women belong to the weaker sex. Many fought as she did and died or were wounded with their weapons in their hands.”

  “Do you know how many?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “There are no official figures. Those that are mentioned are pure fantasy. But one thing is certain. They fought. The British soldiers who detained them and dragged them to the barracks at Richmond and to Kilmainham Prison know it. They wanted to subject them to courts martial and shoot them, too. I know from a very good source: a minister. The British cabinet was terrified, and with reason, to think that if they began shooting women, all of Ireland would be up in arms this time. Prime Minister Asquith himself telegraphed the military chief in Dublin, Sir John Maxwell, categorically forbidding him to shoot a single woman. That’s how Constance Markievicz’s life was saved. A court martial condemned her to death but the sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment due to pressure from the government.”

  But it hadn’t all been enthusiasm, solidarity, and heroism in the civilian population of Dublin during the week of fighting. The Capuchin monk witnessed looting in the shops and stores on Sackville Street and other centrally located streets, committed by vagrants, petty criminals, or simply the poor from nearby marginal neighborhoods, which put the leaders of the IRB, the Volunteers, and the Citizen Army in a difficult position, since they had not foreseen this delinquent deviation in the rebellion. In some cases the rebels tried to stop the sacking of hotels, even firing shots in the air to frighten away the looters devastating the Gresham Hotel, but in others they left them alone, confused by how these humble, hungry people, in whose interests they thought they were fighting, confronted them in a fury to be allowed to rob the elegant stores in the city.

  Not only thieves confronted the rebels on the streets of Dublin. So did many mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the police and soldiers the insurgents had attacked, wounded, or killed during the Rising, sometimes large groups of fearless women agitated by grief, desperation, and rage. In some cases these women even attacked rebel outposts, insulting, stoning, and spitting at the combatants, cursing them and calling them murderers. That had been the most difficult trial for those who believed they had justice, goodness, and truth on their side: discovering that those confronting them were not the enemy dogs of Empire, the soldiers of the army of occupation, but humble Irishwomen blinded by suffering, who did not see in them the liberators of their country but the murderers of their love
d ones, Irishmen like themselves whose only crime was being poor and taking up the trade of soldier or policeman, the way the poor of this world have always earned their living.

  “Nothing is black-and-white, darling,” Alice remarked. “Not even in so just a cause. Here, too, those confused grays appear that cloud everything.”

  Roger agreed. What his friend had just said applied to him. No matter how cautious one was in planning actions with the greatest lucidity, life, more complex than any calculation, made schemes explode and replaced them with uncertain, contradictory situations. Wasn’t he a living example of those ambiguities? His interrogators, Reginald Hall and Basil Thomson, believed he came from Germany to lead the Rising, whose leaders hid it from him because they knew he thought it could not succeed at that time. Could you ask for greater incongruities?

  Would demoralization now spread among the nationalists? Their best cadres were dead, shot, or in prison. Rebuilding the independence movement would take years. The Germans, whom so many of the Irish, like him, trusted, had turned their backs. Years of sacrifice and perseverance dedicated to Ireland, irremediably lost. And he, here in an English prison, waiting for the outcome of a petition for clemency that probably would be turned down. Wouldn’t it have been better to die there, with the poets and mystics, shooting and being shot at? His death would have had a rounded meaning instead of an equivocal ending on the gallows, like a common criminal. Poets and mystics. That’s what they were and that’s how they had acted, choosing as the focus of the rebellion not a barracks or Dublin Castle, the citadel of colonial power, but a civilian building, the Post Office, recently renovated. Chosen by civilized citizens, not politicians or soldiers. They wanted to win over the population before defeating the British soldiers. Hadn’t Joseph Plunkett told him so clearly in their discussions in Berlin? A rebellion of poets and mystics longing for martyrdom to shake the sleeping masses who believed, as John Redmond did, in the pacific way and the good will of the Empire to achieve the freedom of Ireland. Were they ingenuous or clairvoyant?

  He sighed, and Alice patted his arm affectionately.

  “It’s sad and exciting to talk about this, isn’t it, darling Roger?”

  “Yes, Alice. Sad and exciting. At times I feel enraged at what they did. Other times, I envy them with all my soul, and my admiration for them has no limits.”

  “The truth is, all I do is think about this. And about how much I need you, Roger,” said Alice, taking him by the arm. “Your ideas, your lucidity, would help me to see the light in the midst of so much darkness. Do you know something? Not now, but sometime soon, something good will come out of everything that’s happened. There are already signs.”

  Roger agreed without understanding completely what she meant.

  “For the present, the followers of John Redmond are losing more strength every day throughout Ireland,” she added. “We, who were in the minority, now have the majority of the Irish people on our side. You may think it’s a lie, but I swear to you it isn’t. The shootings, the courts martial, the deportations are doing us a great service.”

  Roger noticed that the sheriff, always with his back to them, moved as if he were going to turn and order them to be quiet. But again he didn’t do it. Alice seemed optimistic now. According to her, perhaps Pearse and Plunkett were not so misguided. Because every day in Ireland, in the streets, churches, neighborhood associations, and guilds, spontaneous demonstrations of sympathy for the martyrs, those who had been shot or sentenced to long prison terms, were multiplying, along with shows of hostility toward the police and soldiers of the British army. They were the object of insults and taunts from passersby, to the extent that the military government ordered police and soldiers to always patrol in groups, and when they weren’t on duty to dress in civilian clothes, because the people’s hostility was demoralizing to the forces of law and order.

  According to Alice, the most notable change was in the Catholic Church. The hierarchy and most of the clergy always were closer to the pacifist and gradualist theses, more in favor of Home Rule for Ireland and John Redmond and his followers in the Irish Parliamentary Party than the separatist radicalism of Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, the IRB, and the Volunteers. But since the Rising, this had changed. Perhaps the religious conduct of the insurgents during the week of fighting had an influence on this. The testimonies of priests, among them Brother Austin, present at the barricades, buildings, and places transformed into rebel centers, were conclusive: they had celebrated Masses, offered confession and communion, and many combatants had asked for their blessing before beginning to fire. In all the strongholds the insurgents respected the leaders’ categorical prohibition against consuming even a drop of alcohol. In the periods of calm, the rebels kneeled and prayed the rosary aloud. Not one of those executed, including James Connolly, who had proclaimed himself a socialist and was known as an atheist, had failed to request the assistance of a priest before facing the firing squad. In a wheelchair, still bleeding from the bullet wounds he had received in battle, Connolly was shot after kissing a crucifix handed to him by the chaplain of Kilmainham Prison. Since May, Masses of thanksgiving and homages to the martyrs of Easter Week proliferated throughout Ireland. There was not a Sunday when the priests in their sermons at Mass did not exhort the faithful to pray for the souls of the patriots executed and buried in secret by the British army. Sir John Maxwell had made a formal protest to the Catholic hierarchy, and instead of giving him explanations, Bishop O’Dwyer justified his priests, accusing the general of being “a military dictator” and acting in an anti-Christian manner with the executions and above all his refusal to return the bodies of those shot to their families. That the military government, sheltered by the suppression of rights under martial law, would have buried the patriots in secret to avoid their graves becoming centers of republican pilgrimage caused indignation even among sectors that until now had not seen themselves in sympathy with the radicals.

  “In short, the papists gain more ground every day and we Anglican nationalists are shrinking like La Peau de chagrin, that novel by Balzac. All that’s missing is for you and me to convert to Catholicism too, Roger,” Alice joked.

  “I already practically have,” replied Roger. “And not for political reasons.”

  “I never would. Don’t forget, my father was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland,” Alice said. “Your converting doesn’t surprise me, I’ve seen it coming for some time. Do you remember how we joked with you at the gatherings in my house?”

  “Those unforgettable gatherings,” Roger said with a sigh. “I’m going to tell you something. Now, with so much free time to think, on many days I’ve added it up: where and when was I happiest? At the Tuesday gatherings, in your house on Grosvenor Road, dear Alice. I never told you, but I would leave those meetings in a state of grace. Exalted and happy. Reconciled with life. Thinking, ‘What a shame I didn’t study, didn’t go to university.’ Listening to you and your friends, I felt as distant from culture as the natives of Africa or Amazonia.”

  “Something similar happened to me and them with you, Roger. We envied your travels, your adventures, your having lived so many different lives in those places. I once heard Yeats say, ‘Roger Casement is the most universal Irishman I’ve known. A real citizen of the world.’ I don’t think I ever told you that.”

  They recalled a discussion about symbols, years earlier in Paris, with Herbert Ward. He had shown them the recent casting of one of his sculptures he was very pleased about: an African sorcerer. In fact, it was a beautiful piece that, in spite of its realistic character, showed everything secret and mysterious in the man, his face covered with cuts, armed with a broom and a skull, conscious of the powers conferred upon him by the divinities of the forest, streams, and animals in whom the men and women of the tribe trusted blindly to save them from spells, diseases, fears, and to put them in touch with the afterlife.

  “We all carry one of these ancestors inside us,” said Herbert, pointing at the bronze s
orcerer who, with half-closed eyes, seemed enraptured in one of those dreams into which infusions of herbs plunged him. “The proof? The symbols we pay homage to with reverential respect. Coats of arms, flags, crosses.”

  Roger and Alice disagreed, claiming that symbols should not be seen as anachronisms from the irrational era of humanity. On the contrary, a flag, for example, was the symbol of a community that felt solidarity and shared beliefs, convictions, customs, respecting individual differences and discrepancies that did not destroy but strengthened the common denominator. Both confessed that seeing an Irish republican flag waving in the wind always moved them. How Herbert and Sarita had mocked them for that statement.

  When she learned that while Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a good number of Irish republican flags had been raised on the roofs of the Post Office and Liberty Hall, and then saw the photos of buildings occupied by the rebels in Dublin, like the Imperial and Metropole hotels, with flags at the windows and parapets that blew in the wind, Alice had felt a lump in her throat. That must have caused endless joy in those who experienced it. Later she also learned that in the weeks before the insurrection, while the Volunteers were preparing homemade bombs, sticks of dynamite, grenades, pikes, and bayonets, the members of Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary, were gathering medicines, bandages, disinfectants, and sewing the tricolor flags that erupted on the morning of Monday, April 24, on the roofs of central Dublin. The house of the Plunketts in Kimmage had been the most active workshop for weapons and flags for the uprising.