The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “It was a historic event,” Alice declared. “We abuse words. Politicians especially apply the word historic to any piece of foolishness. But those republican flags in the sky of old Dublin were historic. It will always be remembered with great fervor. A historic event. It has gone around the world, darling. In the United States many papers published it on the front page. Wouldn’t you have liked to see it?”

  Yes, he would have liked to see that too. According to Alice, more and more people on the island were defying the prohibition and placing republican flags on the façades of their houses, even in Belfast and London, pro-British citadels.

  On the other hand, in spite of the war on the Continent, with disturbing news every day—military actions produced dizzying numbers of victims and the outcome was still uncertain—in Britain many people were prepared to help those deported from Ireland by the military authorities. Hundreds of men and women considered subversive had been expelled and were now scattered throughout Britain, ordered to settle in remote localities and, in the great majority of cases, without resources to survive. Alice, who belonged to humanitarian associations that were sending them money, foodstuffs, and clothing, told Roger they had no difficulty collecting funds and help from the general public. In this, too, the participation of the Catholic Church had been important.

  Among the deportees were dozens of women. Many of them—Alice had spoken personally with some—in spite of their solidarity, held a certain rancor toward the commanders of the rebellion who had made it difficult for women to collaborate with the insurgents. And yet almost all the commanders, willingly or not, eventually admired the women in the strongholds and made use of them. The only one who flatly refused to admit women into Boland’s Mill and all the neighboring territory controlled by his companies was Éamon de Valera. His arguments irritated the militants of Cumann na mBan because they were conservative: a woman’s place was in the home and not on the barricade, and her natural tools were the distaff, pots and pans, flowers, needle and thread, not the pistol or the rifle. And her presence could distract the combatants, who, to protect her, would neglect their obligations. The tall, thin professor of mathematics, leader of the Irish Volunteers, with whom Roger had often spoken and maintained an abundant correspondence, was condemned to death by one of those secret, hasty courts martial that tried the leaders of the Rising. But he was saved at the last minute. At the very moment when, having confessed and taken communion, he waited with complete serenity, a rosary between his fingers, to be taken to the back wall of Kilmainham Gaol where the shootings took place, the court decided to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. According to rumors, the companies under the command of Éamon de Valera, in spite of his complete lack of military training, acted with great efficiency and discipline, inflicting a good number of losses on the enemy. They were the last to surrender. But the rumors also said the tension and sacrifices of those days had been so harsh that at one moment his subordinates in the station where his command post operated thought he was losing his mind because of his erratic behavior. His was not the only case. In the rain of lead and fire, without sleep, food, or water, some had gone mad or suffered nervous breakdowns at the barricades.

  Roger had become distracted, recalling the elongated silhouette of Éamon de Valera, his solemn, ceremonious speech. He noticed that Alice was referring now to a horse, with feeling and tears in her eyes. The historian had a great love for animals, but why did this one affect her in so special a way? Gradually he understood that her nephew had told her the story. It dealt with the horse of one of the British lancers who, on the first day of the insurrection, charged the Post Office and were driven back, losing three men. The horse was shot several times and collapsed in front of a barricade, badly wounded. It neighed in terror and piercing pain. It managed at times to stand, but weakened by loss of blood, fell again after attempting to walk a few steps. Behind the barricade an argument broke out between those who wanted to kill it so it wouldn’t suffer any more and those who opposed this, thinking it would recover. Finally, they shot it and had to fire the rifle twice to put an end to its agony.

  “It wasn’t the only animal that died on the streets,” said Alice, distressed. “Many died, horses, dogs, cats, innocent victims of human brutality. Many nights I have nightmares about them. Poor things. We humans are worse than animals, aren’t we, Roger?”

  “Not always, darling. I assure you some are as ferocious as we are. I’m thinking about snakes, for example, whose venom kills you slowly, as you gasp for breath. And the candirú fish of the Amazon that enters your body through the anus and causes hemorrhages. In short …”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Alice. “Enough of war, battles, the wounded, and the dead.”

  But a moment later she told Roger it was amazing how support for Sinn Féin and the IRB was growing among the hundreds of Irish deported and brought to British prisons. Even moderates and independents, and known pacifists, were affiliating with these radical organizations. And a great number of petitions were appearing all over Ireland asking for amnesty for the condemned. In the United States, too, in all the cities where there were Irish communities, protest demonstrations continued against the excesses of the repression following the Rising. John Devoy had done fantastic work and succeeded in having the best of North American society, from artists and entrepreneurs to politicians, professors, and journalists, sign the petitions for amnesty. The House of Representatives approved a motion, written in very severe terms, condemning the summary death sentences for adversaries who had surrendered their weapons. In spite of the defeat, things had not gotten worse with the Rising. In terms of international support, the situation had never been better for the nationalists.

  “The visit has run overtime,” the sheriff interrupted. “You have to say goodbye now.”

  “I’ll get another permit, I’ll come to see you before …” Alice said and then fell silent, standing up. She had turned very pale.

  “Of course, Alice dear,” Roger agreed, embracing her. “I hope you do. You don’t know how good it is for me to see you. How it calms me and fills me with peace.”

  But it didn’t happen this time. He went back to his cell with a tumult of images in his mind, all related to the Easter Week rebellion, as if the memories and testimonies of his friend had taken him out of Pentonville Prison and thrown him into the midst of the street fighting, into the din of battle. He felt an immense nostalgia for Dublin, its buildings and redbrick houses, the tiny gardens protected by wooden fences, the noisy streetcars, the misshapen neighborhoods of precarious dwellings and impoverished, barefoot people surrounding islands of affluence and modernity. How did all that look after artillery fire, incendiary bombs, collapsed buildings? He thought of the Abbey Theatre, the Olympia, the warm, fetid bars smelling of beer, the conversations throwing off sparks. Would Dublin be again what it once was?

  The sheriff didn’t offer to take him to the showers and he didn’t ask him to. The jailer looked so dejected, his expression so detached and absent, he didn’t want to bother him. It made Roger unhappy to see the man suffering in this way, saddened he could do nothing to lift his spirits. Violating regulations, the sheriff had come twice to his cell to talk at night, and each time Roger had agonized at not being able to give Mr. Stacey the serenity he was searching for. The second time, like the first, he had spoken only of his son, Alex, and his death in combat against the Germans in Loos, the unknown place in France he referred to as if it were a cursed spot. Once, after a long silence, the jailer confessed to Roger how bitter the memory was of the time he whipped Alex, still a little boy, for stealing a pastry from the bakery on the corner. “It was wrong and should have been punished,” said Mr. Stacey, “but not so harshly. Whipping a young boy like that was unpardonable cruelty.” Roger tried to reassure him, reminding him that he and his siblings, including his sister, were sometimes hit by Captain Casement, his father, and they had never stopped loving him. But was Mr. Stacey listenin
g to him? He remained silent, ruminating on his pain, his respiration deep and agitated.

  When the jailer closed the cell door, Roger lay down on his cot. He sighed, restless. The conversation with Alice had not done him good. Now he felt sadness at not having been there in his Volunteer uniform, Mauser in hand, taking part in the Rising, not caring that this armed action would end in a slaughter. Perhaps Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and the others were right. It wasn’t a question of winning but of resisting as much as possible. Of sacrificing oneself, like the Christian martyrs of heroic times. Their blood was the seed that germinated, did away with pagan idols and replaced them with Christ the Redeemer. The blood shed by the Volunteers would also bear fruit, it would open the eyes of the blind and win freedom for Ireland. How many companions and friends from Sinn Féin, the Volunteers, the Citizen Army, the IRB had been at the barricades, knowing it was a suicidal battle? No doubt hundreds, thousands, Patrick Pearse the first among them. He always believed martyrdom was the principal weapon of a just struggle. Didn’t that form part of the Irish character, the Celtic inheritance? The Catholic ability to accept suffering was already in Cuchulain, in the mythic heroes of Ireland and their great feats, and by the same token, in the serene heroism of the saints his friend Alice had studied with so much love and knowledge: an infinite capacity for great gestures. An impractical spirit of the Irish, perhaps, but compensated for by immoderate generosity in embracing the most daring dreams of justice, equality, and happiness. Even when defeat was inevitable. No matter how rash the plan of Pearse, Tom Clarke, Plunkett, and the others, in those six days of unequal combat the spirit of the Irish people had come into view for the world to admire: indomitable in spite of so many centuries of servitude, idealistic, fearless, ready for anything in a just cause. How different from the attitude of those compatriots who were prisoners in Limburg camp, blind and deaf to his exhortations. Theirs was the other face of Ireland: the face of the submissive, those who, because of centuries of colonization, had lost the valiant spark that brought so many women and men to the barricades of Dublin. Had he made another mistake in his life? What would have happened if the German weapons on the Aud had reached the hands of the Volunteers on the night of April 20 in Tralee Bay? He imagined hundreds of patriots on bicycles, in automobiles and carts, on mules and donkeys, spreading out under the stars and distributing weapons and ammunition throughout the territory of Ireland. Would the twenty thousand rifles, ten machine guns, and five million rounds of ammunition in the hands of the insurgents have changed things? At least the battles would have lasted longer, the rebels would have defended themselves better and inflicted more losses on the enemy. Happily he noted he was yawning. Sleep would erase those images and calm his disquiet. He thought he was sinking.

  He had a pleasant dream. His mother appeared and disappeared, smiling, beautiful, and graceful in her wide straw hat, a ribbon hanging from it that floated in the breeze. A coquettish flowered parasol protected the whiteness of her cheeks from the sun. Anne Jephson’s eyes were fixed on him and Roger’s were fixed on her and nothing and no one seemed capable of interrupting their silent, tender communication. But suddenly Captain Roger Casement appeared in the grove wearing his resplendent Light Dragoons uniform. He looked at Anne Jephson with eyes that showed an obscene greed. So much vulgarity offended and frightened Roger. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have the strength to prevent what would happen or to start running and rid himself of that horrible presentiment. With tears in his eyes, trembling with terror and indignation, he saw the captain lift up his mother. He heard her give a scream of surprise and then a forced, complaisant little laugh. Trembling with disgust and jealousy, he saw her kick in the air, showing her slim ankles, while his father ran, carrying her among the trees. They were becoming lost from sight in the grove and their laughter tapered off until it disappeared. Now he heard the wind sighing and the warbling of the birds. He didn’t cry. The world was cruel and unjust, and rather than suffering like this, it would be better to die.

  The dream went on for a long while, but when he woke, still in darkness, minutes or hours later, Roger no longer remembered its outcome. Not knowing the time disturbed him again. Occasionally he forgot, but the slightest uneasiness, doubt, or worry made the piercing distress of not knowing what moment of the day or night he was in produced ice in his heart, the feeling of having been expelled from time, of living in a limbo where before, now, afterward did not exist.

  A little more than three months had passed since his capture, and he felt as if he had spent years behind bars, in an isolation in which day by day, hour by hour, he was losing his humanity. He didn’t tell Alice, but if he once had been encouraged by the hope the British government would accept the petition for clemency and commute the death penalty to imprisonment, he had lost it now. In the climate of rage and desire for vengeance in which the Easter Rising had placed the Crown, in particular the military, Britain needed an exemplary punishment for the traitors who saw in Germany, the enemy against whom the Empire was fighting in the fields of Flanders, Ireland’s ally in her struggle for emancipation. The strange thing was that the cabinet had put off the decision for so long. What were they waiting for? Did they want to prolong his agony, making him pay for his ingratitude toward the country that decorated him and knighted him and which he had repaid by conspiring with its adversary? No, in politics feelings didn’t matter, only interest and profit. The government must be coldly evaluating the advantages and damages his execution would bring. Would it serve as a warning? Would the government’s relations with the Irish worsen? The campaign to discredit him claimed no one would cry over this human disgrace, this degenerate that decent society would be rid of thanks to the gallows. It was stupid to have left those diaries for anyone to find when he went to the United States. A piece of negligence that the Empire would make very good use of and that for a long time would cloud the truth of his life, his political conduct, and even his death.

  He fell back to sleep. This time, instead of a dream, he had a nightmare he hardly remembered the next morning. In it there appeared a little bird, a canary with a clear voice martyrized by the bars of the cage in which it was enclosed. This could be seen in the desperation with which it beat its small golden wings unceasingly, as if with this movement the bars would widen and let it leave. Its eyes moved constantly in their sockets, pleading for commiseration. Roger, a boy in short pants, told his mother that cages shouldn’t exist, or zoos, and animals always ought to live in freedom. At the same time, something secret was happening, a danger was approaching, something invisible that his sensibility detected, something insidious, treacherous, already there and prepared to strike. He was perspiring, trembling like a small sheet of paper.

  He woke, so agitated he could barely breathe. He was choking. His heart was pounding so hard it perhaps was the beginning of a heart attack. Should he call the guard on duty? He stopped immediately. What could be better than dying here, on his cot, a natural death that would free him from the gallows? Moments later his heart calmed down and he could breathe again normally.

  Would Father Carey come today? He wanted to see him and have a long conversation about subjects and concerns that had a great deal to do with the soul, religion, and God, and very little to do with politics. And immediately, as he became more tranquil and began to forget his recent nightmare, he recalled his last meeting with the prison chaplain and the moment of sudden tension that filled him with anxiety. They were talking about his conversion to Catholicism. Father Carey told him once again he shouldn’t talk about “conversion,” for having been baptized as a child, he had never left the Church. The act would be a reactualization of his status as a Catholic, something that didn’t require a formal step. In any case—and at that moment, Roger noticed that Father Carey hesitated, searching carefully for words to avoid offending him—His Eminence Cardinal Bourne had thought that if it seemed suitable to Roger, he could sign a document, a private text between him and the Church, expre
ssing his will to return, a reaffirmation of his status as a Catholic and at the same time a testimony of renunciation and repentance for old errors and faults.

  Father Carey could not hide how uncomfortable he felt.

  There was silence. Then, Roger said softly:

  “I won’t sign any document, Father Carey. My reincorporation into the Catholic Church should be something intimate, with you as the only witness.”

  “That’s how it will be.”

  Another tense silence followed.

  “Was Cardinal Bourne referring to what I suppose?” Roger asked. “I mean, the campaign against me, the accusations concerning my private life. Is that what I should atone for in a document in order to be readmitted to the Catholic Church?”

  Father Carey’s breathing had become more rapid. Again he searched for words before responding.

  “Cardinal Bourne is a good and generous man, with a compassionate spirit,” he finally stated. “But don’t forget, Roger, you have on your shoulders the responsibility to watch over the good name of the Church in a country where Catholics are a minority and there are still those who foment great phobias concerning us.”

  “Tell me frankly, Father Carey: has Cardinal Bourne made it a condition of my being readmitted to the Catholic Church that I sign a document repenting of the vile, vicious things I’m accused of in the press?”

  “It isn’t a condition, merely a suggestion,” said the cleric. “You can accept it or not and that won’t change anything. You were baptized. You’re a Catholic and will go on being one. Let’s not talk about this matter any further.”

  And in fact, they spoke no more about it. But the thought of that dialogue returned periodically and led him to wonder whether his desire to return to his mother’s church was pure or stained by the circumstances of his situation. Wasn’t it an act decided for political reasons? To show his solidarity with the Irish Catholics in favor of independence and his hostility to the minority, most of them Protestant, who wanted to continue as part of the Empire? In the eyes of God, what validity would a conversion have that at bottom obeyed nothing spiritual but his longing to feel sheltered by a community, to be part of a great tribe? God would see in that kind of conversion the gesticulations of a shipwrecked man.