Pentonville Prison, 1916
When they opened the door to his cell, the street noise that the stone walls had muffled came in along with the stream of light and a blast of wind. Roger woke in alarm. Blinking, still confused, struggling to calm down, he saw the silhouette of the sheriff leaning in the doorway, his flabby face, with its blond moustache and reproachful little eyes, contemplating him with a dislike the jailer had never tried to hide. This was someone who would suffer if the British government granted his request for clemency.
‘Visitor,’ muttered the sheriff, not taking his eyes off the prisoner.
He stood, rubbing his arms. How long had he slept? Not knowing the time was one of the torments of Pentonville. In Brixton Prison and the Tower of London he had heard the bells that marked the half-hour and the hour; here, thick walls kept the clamour of the church bells along the Caledonian Road and the noise of Islington Market from reaching the prison interior, and the guards posted at the door strictly obeyed the order not to speak to him. The sheriff put handcuffs on the prisoner and indicated that he should follow him. Was his lawyer bringing good news? Had the Cabinet met and reached a decision? Perhaps the sheriff’s gaze was more filled than ever with the anger Roger inspired in him because his sentence had been commuted. They walked down the long passageway of red brick blackened by grime, past the metal doors of the cells and the discoloured walls where every twenty or twenty-five paces a high barred window allowed him to glimpse a small piece of grey sky.
When Roger entered the narrow visitors’ room, his heart sank. Waiting for him was not his attorney, Maître George Gavan Duffy, but one of his assistants, a blond, sickly-looking young man with prominent cheekbones who dressed like a fop and whom he had seen during the four days of his trial, carrying and fetching papers for the defence lawyers. Why, instead of coming in person, had Gavan Duffy sent one of his clerks?
The young man looked at him with anger and disgust in his eyes. What was wrong with this imbecile? He looks at me as if I were vermin, thought Roger.
‘Any news?’
The young man shook his head.
‘Regarding the petition for pardon, not yet,’ he murmured drily, grimacing in a way that made him look even sicklier. ‘It’s necessary to wait for the Council of Ministers to meet.’ The presence of the sheriff and another guard in the small room irritated Roger. Though they remained silent and motionless, he knew they were listening to everything. The idea oppressed his chest and made it difficult for him to breathe. ‘But considering recent events,’ the young man added, blinking rapidly and opening and closing his mouth in an exaggerated way, ‘everything is more difficult now.’
‘Outside news doesn’t reach Pentonville. What happened?’ What if the German admiralty had finally decided to attack Great Britain from the Irish coast? What if the dreamed-of invasion had taken place and the Kaiser’s cannon were avenging at this very moment the Irish patriots shot by the English in the Easter Rising? If the war had taken that direction, his plans would be realized in spite of everything.
‘Now it has become difficult, perhaps impossible, to succeed,’ the clerk repeated. He was pale, containing his indignation, and Roger detected his skull beneath the whitish skin of his complexion. He sensed that behind him the sheriff was smiling.
‘What are you talking about? Mr Gavan Duffy was optimistic about the petition. What happened to make him change his mind?’
‘Your diaries,’ the young man hissed. He had lowered his voice and it was difficult for Roger to hear him. ‘Scotland?Yard found them in your house on Ebury Street.’
He paused for a long time, waiting for Roger to say something. But since he had fallen mute, the clerk gave free rein to his indignation.
‘My good man, how could you be so stupid?’ He spoke slowly, making his rage more obvious. ‘How could you, my good man, put such things on paper? And if you did, how could you not take the basic precaution of destroying those diaries before embarking on a conspiracy against the British Empire?
‘Portions of those diaries are circulating everywhere now,’ the clerk added, calmer, though his disgust persisted, not looking at Roger. ‘In the Admiralty, the minister’s spokesman, Captain Reginald Hall himself, has given copies to dozens of reporters. They’re all over London. In Parliament, the House of Lords, Liberal and Conservative clubs, editorial offices, churches. It’s the only topic of conversation in the city.’
Roger did not say anything. He did not move. Once again he had the strange sensation that had taken hold of him many times in recent months, ever since that grey, rainy April morning in 1916 when, numb with cold, he was arrested in the ruins of McKenna’s Fort, in the south of Ireland: this did not have to do with him, they were talking about someone else, these things were happening to someone else.
‘I know your private life is not my business, or Mr Gavan Duffy’s, or anyone’s,’ added the young clerk, making an effort to lower the fury that saturated his voice. ‘This is a strictly professional matter. Mr Gavan Duffy wanted to bring you up to date regarding the situation. And to prepare you. The request for clemency may be compromised. This morning there are already protests in some newspapers, confidences betrayed, rumours regarding the content of your diaries. The favourable public response to the petition might be affected. Merely a supposition, of course. Mr Gavan Duffy will keep you informed. Do you wish me to give him a message?’
With an almost imperceptible movement of his head, the prisoner refused. He turned immediately afterwards, facing the door of the visitors’ room. The sheriff signalled the guard, who unbolted and opened the door. The return to his cell seemed interminable. During his passage down the long hall with the rock-like walls of blackened red brick, Roger had the feeling that at any moment he might trip and fall face down on those damp stones and not get up again. When he reached the metal door of his cell, he remembered: on the day they brought him to Pentonville, the sheriff had told him that, without exception, all the prisoners who occupied this cell had ended up on the gallows.
‘Could I bathe today?’ he asked before he went in.
The fat jailer shook his head, looking into his eyes with the same repugnance Roger had detected in the clerk’s gaze.
‘You cannot bathe until the day of your execution,’ said the sheriff, relishing each word. ‘And, on that day, only if it’s your final wish. Others, instead of a bath, prefer a good meal. A bad business for Mr Ellis, because then, when they feel the noose, they shit themselves. And leave the place like a pigsty. Mr Ellis is the hangman.
Regarding his birth on 1 September 1864, in Doyle’s Cottage, Lawson Terrace, in Sandycove, a Dublin suburb, he remembered nothing, of course. Even though he always knew he had first seen the light of day in the capital of Ireland, for much of his life he took for granted what his father, Captain Roger Casement, who had served for eight years with distinction in the Third Regiment of Light Dragoons in India, had inculcated in him: his true birthplace was County Antrim, in the heart of Ulster, the Protestant and pro-British Ireland where the Casement line had been established since the eighteenth century.
Roger was brought up and educated as an Anglican in the Church of Ireland, as were his sister and brothers, Agnes (Nina), Charles and Tom – all three older than he – but since earliest childhood he had intuited that in matters of religion not everything in his family was as harmonious as in other areas. Even for a very young child it was impossible not to notice that his mother, when she was with her sisters and Scots cousins, behaved in a way that seemed to hide something. He would discover what it was when he was an adolescent: even though Anne Jephson had apparently converted to Protestantism in order to marry his father, behind her husband’s back she continued to be a Catholic (‘Papist’, Captain Casement would have said), going to confession, hearing Mass and taking Communion, and, in the most jealously guarded of secrets, he himself had been baptized a Catholic at the age of four, during a holiday he and his siblings took with their mother to Rhyl, in the north of ?Wales, to visit their maternal aunts and uncles.
During those years in Dublin, or the times they spent in London and Jersey, Roger had absolutely no interest in religion, though during the Sunday ceremony he would pray, sing and follow the service with respect in order not to displease his father. His mother had given him piano lessons and he had a clear, tuneful voice for which he was applauded at family gatherings when he sang old Irish ballads. What really interested him at that time were the stories Captain Casement, when he was in a good humour, recounted to him and his brothers and sister. Stories about India and Afghanistan, especially his battles with Afghans and Sikhs. Those exotic names and landscapes, those travels crossing forests and mountains that concealed treasures, wild beasts, predatory animals, ancient peoples with strange customs and savage gods, fired his imagination. At times the other children were bored by the stories, but young Roger could have spent hours, even days, listening to his father’s adventures along the remote frontiers of the Empire.
Though he admired his father, the parent Roger really loved was his mother, a slender woman who seemed to float instead of walk, who had light eyes and hair, whose extremely soft hands when they tousled his curls or caressed his body at bath time filled him with happiness. One of the first things he would learn – at the age of five or six – was that he could run into his mother’s arms only when the captain was not nearby. His father, true to the Puritan tradition of his family, did not believe in coddling children, since this made them soft in the struggle to survive. In his father’s presence, Roger kept his distance from the pale, delicate Anne Jephson. But when the captain went out to meet friends at his club or take a walk, the boy would run to her and she would cover him with kisses and caresses. At times Nina, Charles and Tom protested: ‘You love Roger more than us.’ Their mother assured them she did not, she loved them all the same, except Roger was very little and needed more attention and affection than the older ones.
When his mother died, in 1873, Roger was nine years old. He had learned to swim and won all the races with children his age and even older. Unlike Nina, Charles and Tom, who shed many tears during the wake and burial of Anne Jephson, Roger did not cry even once. During those gloomy days, the Casement household was transformed into a funeral chapel filled with people dressed in mourning who spoke in low voices and embraced Captain Casement and the four children with contrite faces, pronouncing words of condolence. For many days he couldn’t say a word, as if he had fallen mute. He responded to questions with movements of his head, or gestures, and remained serious, his head lowered and his gaze lost, even at night in the darkened room, unable to sleep. From then on and for the rest of his life, from time to time in dreams the figure of Anne Jephson would come to visit him with that inviting smile, opening her arms where he would huddle, feeling protected and happy with those slim fingers on his head, his back, his cheeks, a sensation that seemed to defend him against the evils of the world.
His brothers and sister were soon consoled. And Roger too, apparently. Because even though he recovered his speech, this was a subject he never mentioned.
The one who was not consoled and never became himself again was Captain Roger Casement. Since he wasn’t effusive and young Roger and the other children had never seen him showering their mother with gallantries, the four of them were surprised at the cataclysm his wife’s disappearance meant for their father. Always so meticulous, he dressed carelessly now, he let his beard grow, scowled, his eyes filled with resentment as if his children were to blame for his being a widower. Shortly after Anne’s death, he decided to leave Dublin and sent the four children to Ulster, to Magherintemple House, the family estate, where from then on their paternal great-uncle, John Casement, and his wife Charlotte, would take charge of their upbringing. Their father, as if wanting to have nothing to do with them, went to live thirty miles away, at the Adair Arms Hotel in Ballymena where, as Great-Uncle John let slip occasionally, Captain Casement, ‘half mad with grief and loneliness’, dedicated his days and his nights to spiritualism, attempting to communicate with his dead wife through mediums, cards and crystal balls.
From then on Roger rarely saw his father and never again heard him tell those stories about India and Afghanistan. Captain Roger Casement died of tuberculosis in 1876, three years after his wife. Roger had just turned twelve.
When Roger was fifteen, Great-Uncle John Casement advised him to abandon his studies and look for work, since he and his brothers and sister had no income to live on. He happily accepted the advice. By mutual agreement they decided Roger would go to Liverpool where there were more possibilities for work than in Northern Ireland, and live with his aunt and her husband, Grace and Edward Bannister. In fact, shortly after arriving at the Bannisters’, Uncle Edward obtained a position for him in the same company where he himself had worked for so many years. Roger began as an apprentice in the shipping company soon after his fifteenth birthday. He looked older. He was very tall and slim, with deep grey eyes, curly black hair, very light skin, even teeth, and he was temperate, discreet, neat, amiable and obliging. He spoke English with an Irish accent, the cause of jokes among his cousins.
He was a serious boy, tenacious and laconic, not very well prepared intellectually but hard-working. He took his duties in the Department of Administration and Accounting very seriously, determined to learn. At first, his tasks were those of a messenger. He fetched and carried documents from one office to another and went to the port to take care of formalities regarding ships, customs and warehouses. In the four years he worked at Elder Dempster Lines, Roger did not become intimate with anyone due to his retiring manner and austere habits: opposed to carousing, he practically did not drink and was never seen frequenting the bars and brothels in the port. He did, however, become an inveterate smoker. His passion for Africa and his commitment to doing well in the company led him to read carefully and fill with notes the pamphlets and publications dealing with maritime trade between the British Empire and West Africa that made the rounds of the offices. Then he would repeat with conviction the ideas that permeated those texts. Bringing European products to Africa and importing the raw materials that African soil produced was, more than a commercial operation, an enterprise in favour of the progress of peoples caught in pre-history, sunk in cannibalism and the slave trade. Commerce brought religion, morality, law, the values of a modern, educated, free and democratic Europe, progress that would eventually transform tribal unfortunates into men and women of our time. In this enterprise, the British Empire was in the vanguard of Europe, and one had to feel proud of being part of it and the work accomplished at Elder Dempster Lines. His office colleagues exchanged mocking looks and wondered whether young Roger Casement was a fool or a smart alec, whether he believed that nonsense or declaimed it in order to look good to his superiors.
He made three trips to West Africa on the SS Bounny and the experience filled him with so much enthusiasm that after the third voyage he gave up his job and announced to his siblings, aunt, uncle and cousins that he had decided to live and work in Africa. He did this in an exalted way and, as his Uncle Edward said to him, like those crusaders in the Middle Ages who left for the East to liberate Jerusalem. The family went to the port to see him off, and his cousin Gee and sister Nina shed some tears. Roger was twenty years old.
Pentonville Prison, 1916
‘Visitor,’ muttered the sheriff, looking at him with contempt in his eyes and voice. While Roger stood and dusted off his prisoner’s uniform with his hands, he added sarcastically: ‘You’re in the papers again today, Mr Casement. Not for being a traitor to your country –’
‘My country is Ireland,’ Roger interrupted.
‘– but because of your perversions.’ The sheriff made a clucking noise with his tongue as if he were going to spit. ‘A traitor and pervert at the same time. What garbage! It will be a pleasure to see you dancing at the end of a rope, ex-Sir Roger.’
‘The Cabinet turned down the petition for clemency?’
‘Not yet,’ the sheriff hesitated before answering. ‘But it will. And so will His Majesty the King, of course.’
‘I won’t petition him for clemency. He’s your king, not mine.’
‘Ireland is British,’ muttered the sheriff. ‘Now more than ever after crushing that cowardly Easter Week Rising in Dublin. A stab in the back of a country at war. I wouldn’t have shot your leaders, I would’ve hanged them.’
He fell silent because they had reached the visitors’ room.
It wasn’t Father Carey, the Catholic chaplain at Pentonville Prison, who had come to see him, but Gertrude, Gee, his cousin. She embraced him tightly and Roger felt her trembling in his arms. He thought of a little bird numb with cold. Gee had aged since his imprisonment and trial. The clear light of her eyes had gone out and there were wrinkles on her face, neck and hands. She dressed in dark, worn clothing.
‘I must stink like all the rubbish in the world,’ Roger joked, pointing at his coarse blue uniform. ‘They took away my right to bathe. They’ll give it back only once, if I’m executed.’
‘You won’t be, the Council of Ministers will grant clemency,’ Gertrude asserted, nodding to give more force to her words. ‘President Wilson will intercede with the British government on your behalf, Roger. He’s promised to send a telegram. They’ll grant it, there won’t be an execution, believe me.’
The way she said this was so strained, her voice broke so much, that Roger felt sorry for her, for all his friends who, like Gee, suffered these days from the same anguish and uncertainty. He wanted to ask about the attacks in the papers the jailer had mentioned but controlled himself. The president of the United States would intercede for him? If he did, his action would have an effect. There was still a possibility the Cabinet would commute his sentence.
There was no place to sit, and Roger and Gertrude remained standing, very close together, their backs to the sheriff and the guard. The four presences transformed the small visitors’ room into a claustrophobic place.
‘No one believes the vile things they’re publishing about you,’ said Gertrude, lowering her voice to a whisper, as if the two men standing there might hear her. ‘Every decent person is indignant that the government is using this kind of slander to weaken the manifesto so many important people have signed in your favour, Roger.’
Her voice broke, as if she were going to sob. Roger embraced her again.
‘You know that everything I’ve done has been for Ireland, don’t you? For a noble, generous cause. Isn’t that true, Gee?’
She had started to sob, very quietly, her face pressed against his chest.
‘We’re doing everything, everything to help you, Roger,’ said Gee, becoming very serious again. Her voice had aged too; firm and pleasant once, it now was hesitant and cracked. ‘We who love you, and there are many of us. Moving heaven and earth. Writing letters, visiting politicians, officials, diplomats. Explaining, pleading. Knocking at every door.’
‘Ten minutes,’ decreed the sheriff. ‘Time to say goodbye.’
Central Africa, 1903
The journey of the British consul, Roger Casement, up the Congo River, which began on 5 June 1903 and would change his life forever, had been scheduled to begin the previous year. He had been suggesting this expedition to the Foreign Office since 1900 when, after serving in Old Calabar (Nigeria), Lourenço Marques (Maputo) and São Paulo de Luanda (Angola), he officially took up residence as Consul of Great Britain in Boma – a misbegotten village – claiming that the best way to prepare a report on the situation of the natives in the Congo Free State was to leave this remote capital for the forests and tribes of the Middle and Upper Congo. That was where the exploitation was occurring that he had been reporting to the Ministry of Foreign Relations since his arrival in these territories. Finally, after weighing those reasons of state that never failed to turn the consul’s stomach, even though he understood them – Great Britain was an ally of Belgium and did not want to push her into Germany’s arms – the Foreign Office authorized him to undertake the journey to the villages, stations, missions, posts, encampments and factories where the extraction of rubber took place, the black gold avidly coveted now all over the world for tyres and bumpers on trucks and cars and a thousand other industrial and household uses. He had to verify on the ground how much truth was in the denunciations of atrocities committed against natives in the Congo of His Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians, made by the Aborigines’ Protection Society in London and some Baptist churches and Catholic missions in Europe and the United States.
He prepared for the journey with his customary meticulousness and an enthusiasm he hid from Belgian functionaries and the colonists and merchants of Boma. Now, with a thorough knowledge of the subject, he would be able to argue to his superiors that the Empire, faithful to its tradition of justice and fair play, should lead an international campaign to put an end to this ignominy.
But then, in the middle of 1902, he had his third attack of malaria, one even worse than the previous two; he had suffered from the disease ever since he had come to Africa in 1884, just when he had realized his life’s desire: to be part of an expedition headed by the most famous adventurer on African soil, Henry Morton Stanley. To serve at the pleasure of the explorer who, in a legendary trek of close to three years between 1874 and 1877, had crossed Africa from east to west, following the course of the Congo River from its source to its mouth in the Atlantic! To accompany the hero who found the missing Dr Livingstone! That was when he suffered his first attack, as if the gods wanted to extinguish his exaltation. But this was nothing compared to the second three years later – 1887 – and above all, this third attack, in 1902, when for the first time he thought he would die. The symptoms were the same that dawn in the middle of 1902 when, his travelling bag already packed with maps, compass, pencils and notebooks, he felt himself trembling with cold as he opened his eyes in the bedroom on the top floor of his house in Boma, in the colonists’ district. He moved aside the mosquito netting and saw through the windows, without glass or curtains but with metal screens to keep out insects and riddled now by a downpour, the muddy waters of the great river and the outline of islands covered with vegetation. He couldn’t stand. His legs collapsed under him, as if they were made of rags. John, his bulldog, was frightened and began to jump and bark. He let himself fall back into bed. His body was burning and the cold penetrated his bones. He shouted for Charlie and Mawuku, the Congolese steward and cook who slept on the lower floor, but no one answered. They must have gone out and, caught by the storm, run to take shelter under a baobab tree until it abated. Malaria again? The consul cursed. Just on the eve of the expedition? He would have diarrhoea and haemorrhages, and a debilitated state that would oblige him to stay in bed for days, weeks, dazed and shivering.
For three weeks Roger was devastated by fevers and fits of shivering. He lost a stone, and on the first day he could stand, he took a few steps and fell to the floor exhausted, in a state of weakness he did not recall having felt before. He telegraphed the Foreign Office that the state of his health obliged him to postpone the expedition. And since the rains made the forests and river impassable then, the expedition to the interior of the Congo Free State had to wait a few more months that would turn into a year. Another year, recovering very slowly from the fevers and trying to regain the weight he had lost, picking up the tennis racket again, swimming, playing bridge or chess to pass the long nights in Boma, while he resumed his tedious consular tasks: making note of the ships that arrived and departed, the goods the merchant ships of Antwerp unloaded – rifles, munitions, chicote whips, wine, holy pictures, crucifixes, coloured glass beads – and the ones they carried to Europe, the immense stacks of rubber, ivory and animal skins.
The apparent reason for the 1884 expedition in which Roger served his apprenticeship as an explorer had been to prepare the communities scattered along the banks of the Upper, Middle and Lower Congo, in thousands of miles of dense jungles, gorges, waterfalls and mountains thick with vegetation, for the arrival of the European merchants and administrators that the International Congo Society (AIC), presided over by Leopold II, would bring in once the Western powers granted the king the concession. Stanley and his companions had to explain to the half-naked chieftains, tattooed and feathered, sometimes with thorns in their faces and arms, sometimes with reed funnels on their penises, the benevolent intentions of the Europeans: they would come to help them improve their living conditions, rid them of deadly plagues like sleeping sickness, educate them and open their eyes to the truths of this world and the next, thanks to which their children and grandchildren would attain a life that was decent, just and free.
I wasn’t aware because I didn’t want to be aware, he thought. Charlie had covered him with all the blankets in the house. In spite of that and the blazing sun outside, the consul, curled up and freezing, trembled beneath the mosquito net. But worse than being a willing blind man was finding explanations for what any impartial observer would have called a swindle. Because in all the villages reached by the expedition of 1884, after distributing beads and trinkets and then the aforementioned explanations made by interpreters (many of whom could not make themselves understood by the natives), Stanley had the chiefs and witch doctors sign contracts, written in French, pledging to provide manual labour, lodging, guides and food to the officials, agents and employees of the AIC in the work they would undertake to achieve the goals that inspired the Society. They signed with Xs, lines, blots, drawings, without a word and without knowing what they were signing or what signing was, amused by the necklaces, bracelets and adornments of coloured glass they received and the little swallows of liquor with which Stanley invited them to toast their agreement.
As the years passed – eighteen had gone by since the expedition carried out under Stanley’s leadership in 1884 – Roger Casement reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted onto the continent of Africa. In spite of that, like everyone who had worked under Stanley’s command, he could not fail to acknowledge his charisma, his affability, his magic, that mixture of temerity and cold calculation with which the adventurer accumulated great feats. He came and went through Africa, on the one hand sowing desolation and death – burning and looting villages, shooting natives, flaying the backs of his porters with the chicotes made of strips of hippopotamus hide that had left thousands of scars on ebony bodies throughout Africa – and on the other opening routes to commerce and evangelization in immense territories filled with wild beasts, predatory insects and epidemics which seemed to respect him like one of those titans of Homeric legends and biblical histories.
‘Don’t you sometimes feel remorse, have a bad conscience because of what we’re doing?’
The question burst from the young man’s lips in an unpremeditated way. And he could not take it back. The flames from the bonfire in the centre of the camp crackled as small branches and imprudent insects burned there.
‘Remorse? A bad conscience?’ The head of the expedition wrinkled his nose and the expression on his freckled, sunburned face soured, as if he had never heard those words and was trying to guess what they meant. ‘For what?’
‘For the contracts we have them sign,’ said Casement, overcoming his embarrassment. ‘They place their lives, their villages, everything they have, in the hands of the International Congo Society. And not one of them knows what he’s signing because none of them speaks French.’
‘If they knew French, they still wouldn’t understand those contracts.’ The explorer laughed his frank, open laugh, one of his most amiable attributes. ‘I don’t even understand what they mean.’
He was a strong, very short man, almost a midget, still young, with an athletic appearance, flashing grey eyes, thick moustache and an irresistible personality. He always wore high boots, a pistol at his waist and a light jacket with a good number of pockets. He laughed again, and the overseers of the expedition, who with Stanley and Roger drank coffee and smoked around the fire, laughed too, adulating their leader. But Casement did not laugh.
‘I do, though it’s true the rigmarole they’re written in seems intentional, so they won’t be understood,’ Roger said respectfully. ‘It comes down to something very simple. They give their lands to the AIC in exchange for promises of social assistance. They pledge to support the construction projects: roads, bridges, docks, factories. To supply the labour needed for the camps and public order, and feed the officials and workers for as long as the work continues. The Society offers nothing in return. No salaries, no compensation. I always believed we were here for the good of the Africans, Mr Stanley. I’d like you, whom I’ve admired since I was a boy, to give me reasons to go on believing it’s true. That these contracts are, in fact, for their good.’
Eighteen years later, in the disordered images the fever sent whirling around his head, Roger recalled the look, inquisitive, surprised, mocking at moments, with which Henry Morton Stanley inspected him.
‘Africa wasn’t made for the weak,’ he said at last, as if talking to himself. ‘The things that worry you are signs of weakness. In the world we’re in, I mean. This isn’t the United States or England, as you must realize. In Africa the weak don’t survive. They’re finished off by bites, fevers, poisoned arrows or the tsetse fly.’
Pentonville Prison, 1916
‘You hate me and can’t hide it,’ Roger Casement said. The sheriff, after a moment’s surprise, agreed with a grimace that for an instant transformed his bloated face.
‘I have no reason to hide it,’ he murmured. ‘But you’re wrong. I don’t feel hatred for you. I feel contempt. That’s all traitors deserve.’
They were walking along the corridor of soot-stained bricks towards the visitors’ room, where the Catholic chaplain, Father Carey, was waiting for the prisoner. Through the narrow barred windows, Casement could see large patches of dark, swollen clouds. He imagined the stalls and stands at the nearby market, in the middle of Islington’s large park, soaked and shaken by the storm. He felt a sting of envy thinking about the people who were buying and selling, protected by raincoats and umbrellas.
‘You had everything,’ the sheriff grumbled behind him. ‘Diplomatic posts. Decorations. The king knighted you. And you went to sell yourself to the Germans.’
He fell silent, and Roger thought the sheriff was sighing.
‘Whenever I think about my poor son killed over there in the trenches, I tell myself you’re one of his killers, Mr Casement.’
‘I’m very sorry you lost a son,’ Roger replied, not turning round. ‘I know you won’t believe me, but I haven’t killed anyone yet.’
‘You won’t have time to do that now,’ was the sheriff’s judgement. ‘Thank God.’ They had reached the door of the visitors’ room. The sheriff stayed outside, next to the jailer on guard. Only visits from chaplains were private; in all the others the sheriff or a guard, and sometimes both, remained. Roger was happy to see the silhouette of the cleric. Father Carey came forward to meet him and took his hand.
‘I made enquiries and have the reply,’ he announced, smiling. ‘Your memory was exact. You were, in fact, baptized as a child in the parish of Rhyl, in Wales. Your name is in the register. Your mother and two of your maternal aunts were present. You don’t need to be received again into the Catholic Church. You’ve always been in it.’
Roger Casement agreed. The very distant impression that had accompanied him his whole life was correct. His mother had baptized him, hiding it from his father, on one of their trips to Wales. He was glad because of the complicity the secret established between him and Anne Jephson. And because in this way he felt more in tune with himself, his mother and Ireland, as if his approach to Catholicism were a natural consequence of everything he had done and attempted in these last few years, including his mistakes and failures.
Not long before, a small bench had been installed in the visitors’ room. They sat on it, their knees touching. Father Carey had been a chaplain in London prisons for more than twenty years and accompanied many men condemned to death to their end. His constant dealings with prison populations had not hardened his character. He was considerate and attentive and Roger Casement liked him from their first encounter. He did not recall ever having heard him say anything that might wound him; on the contrary, when it was time to ask questions or talk to him he showed extreme delicacy. He always felt good with him. Father Carey was tall, bony, almost skeletal, with very white skin and a greying, pointed beard that covered part of his chin. His eyes were always damp, as if he had just cried, even though he was laughing.
‘I thank you for not asking me anything about those loathsome things they apparently are saying about me, Father Carey.’
‘I haven’t read them, Roger. When someone has attempted to talk to me about them, I’ve made him be quiet. I don’t know and don’t want to know what that’s about.’
‘I don’t know either,’ Roger said with a smile. ‘You can’t read newspapers here. One of my lawyer’s clerks told me they were so scandalous they put the petition for clemency at risk. Degeneracies, terrible vileness, it seems.’
Father Carey listened to him with his usual tranquil expression.
‘I believe it’s better not to know what they’re accusing me of. Alice Stopford Green thinks it’s an operation mounted by the government to counteract the sympathy in many sectors for the petition for clemency.’
‘Nothing can be excluded in the world of politics,’ said the priest. ‘It’s not the cleanest of human activities.’
There were some discreet knocks at the door, which opened, and the sheriff’s plump face appeared. ‘Five more minutes, Father Carey.’
‘The director of the prison gave me half an hour. Weren’t you told?’
The sheriff’s face showed surprise. ‘If you say so, I believe you,’ and he apologized. ‘Excuse the interruption, then. You still have twenty minutes.’ He disappeared and the door closed again.
‘Is there more news from Ireland?’ Roger asked, somewhat abruptly, as if he suddenly wanted to change the subject.
‘It seems the shootings have stopped. Public opinion, not only there but in England too, has been very critical of the summary executions. Now the government has announced that all those arrested in the Easter Week Rising will pass through the courts.’
Roger Casement became distracted. He looked at the tiny window in the wall, also barred. He saw only a tiny square of grey sky and thought about the great paradox: he had been tried and sentenced for carrying arms for an attempt at violent secession by Ireland, when in fact he had undertaken that dangerous, perhaps absurd trip from Germany to the coast of Tralee to try to stop the uprising he was sure would fail from the moment he learned it was being prepared. Was all of history like that? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists?
‘It’s likely I’ll go down in history as one of those responsible for the Easter Week Rising,’ he said with irony. ‘You and I know I came here risking my life to try to stop that rebellion.’
‘Well, you and I and someone else,’ Father Carey said with a laugh, pointing up with a finger.
‘In Africa,’ Roger said, ‘I often saw blacks as well as whites fall suddenly into a crisis of despair. In the middle of the undergrowth, when we lost our way. When we entered a territory the African porters considered hostile. In the middle of the river, when a canoe overturned. Or in the villages. I was never afraid of death until now. I saw it at close range many times. In the Congo, on expeditions through inhospitable places filled with wild animals. In Amazonia, in rivers replete with whirlpools and surrounded by outlaws. Just a short while ago, when I left the submarine at Tralee, on Banna Strand, when the rowing boat capsized and it seemed we would all drown. I’ve often felt death very close. And I wasn’t afraid. But I am now.
‘If the petition is rejected, will you be with me until the end?’ he asked, not looking at the priest.
‘Of course,’ said Father Carey. ‘You shouldn’t think about that. Nothing has been decided yet.’
‘I know that, Father Carey. I haven’t lost hope. But it does me good to know you will be there with me. Your presence will give me courage. I won’t make an unfortunate scene, I promise.’
‘Would you like us to pray together?’
‘Let’s talk a little more, if you don’t mind. This will be the last question I’ll ask you about the matter. If I’m executed, can my body be taken to Ireland and buried there?’
He sensed the chaplain hesitating and looked at him. Father Carey had paled slightly. He saw his discomfit as the priest shook his head.
‘No, Roger. If that happens, you’ll be buried in the prison cemetery.’
‘In enemy territory,’ Casement murmured, trying to make a joke that failed. ‘If you like, we can pray now, Father.’
Whenever he prayed he thought of his mother, a slim figure dressed in white, a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon that danced in the wind, walking under the trees in a field. Were they in Wales, in Ireland, in Antrim, in Jersey? He didn’t know where, but the countryside was as beautiful as the smile shining on Anne Jephson’s face. Praying like this brought back to him a childhood when, thanks to his mother’s presence, everything in life was beautiful and happy.
They parted with a handshake. In the long, damp corridor, without having planned it, Roger Casement said to the sheriff: ‘I’m very sorry about the death of your son. I haven’t had children. I imagine there’s no more terrible pain in this life.’
The sheriff made a small noise with his throat but did not respond. In his cell, Roger lay on his cot and picked up The Imitation of Christ. But he couldn’t concentrate on reading. The letters danced before his eyes and in his head images threw out sparks in a mad round. The figure of Anne Jephson appeared more than once.
What would his life have been like if his mother, instead of dying so young, had been alive as he became an adolescent, a man? He probably would not have undertaken the African adventure. He would have remained in Ireland or in Liverpool and had a bureaucratic career and an honourable, obscure and comfortable life with a wife and children. He smiled: no, that kind of life wasn’t for him. The one he had led, with all its misfortunes, was preferable. He had seen the world, his horizons had broadened enormously, he had a better understanding of life, human reality, the innermost core of colonialism, the tragedy of so many peoples caused by that aberration.
If the subtle Anne Jephson had lived, he would not have discovered the sad, beautiful history of Ireland, the one they never taught him in Ballymena High School, the history still hidden from the children and adolescents of North Antrim. They were still made to believe that Ireland was a savage country with no past worth remembering, raised to civilization by the occupier, educated and modernized by the Empire that stripped it of its tradition, language and sovereignty. He had learned all this in Africa, where he never would have spent the best years of his youth and early maturity or ever come to feel so much pride in the country where he was born and so much rage because of what Great Britain had done, if his mother had lived.
Were they justified, the sacrifices of his twenty years in Africa, the seven in South America, the year or so in the heart of the Amazonian jungles, the year and a half of loneliness, sickness and frustration in Germany? He never had cared about money, but wasn’t it absurd that after having worked so hard all his life, he was now a pauper? The last balance in his bank account was ten pounds sterling. He had never learned to save. He had spent all his income on others – on his three siblings, on humanitarian organizations like the Congo Reform Association and on Irish nationalist institutions like St Enda’s School and the Gaelic League, to which for some time he had handed over his entire income. In order to spend money on those causes he had lived austerely, for example, residing for long periods of time in cheap boarding houses not appropriate to his rank (as his colleagues at the Foreign Office had insinuated). No one would remember the donations, gifts or assistance now that he had failed. Only his final defeat would be remembered.
But that was not the worst thing.
Degeneracies, perversions, vices, all human lewdness. That is what the British government wanted to remain of him.
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 for a long time would cloud the truth of his life, his political conduct and even his death.
He had been weak and succumbed to lust many times. Not as many as he had written in his pocket diaries and notebooks, even though writing what he hadn’t experienced, what he only had wanted to experience, was undoubtedly also a way – cowardly and timid – to have the experience and therefore surrender to temptation. Was he paying for that in spite of not really having enjoyed it except in the uncertain, ungraspable way fantasies were experienced? Would he have to pay for everything he hadn’t done, had only desired and written about? God would know how to differentiate and surely would punish those rhetorical errors less severely than the sins he had really committed.
In any event, writing what he hadn’t experienced in order to pretend he had already carried an implicit punishment: the sensation of failure and frustration in which the lying games in his diaries always ended (as did the real experiences, for that matter). But now those irresponsible games had placed in the hands of the enemy a formidable weapon to vilify his name and memory.
Roger recalled, in those distant years of his adolescence, that his first feelings for well-formed bodies, virile muscles, the harmonious slimness of adolescents, did not seem malicious, concupiscent emotion but a manifestation of sensibility and aesthetic enthusiasm. This is what he had believed for a long time. And this same artistic vocation was what had induced him to learn how to take photographs in order to capture those beautiful bodies on pieces of cardboard. At some moment he realized, when he was already living in Africa, that his admiration was not healthy or, rather, it was healthy and unhealthy at the same time, for those harmonious, sweating, muscular bodies, without a drop of oil, in which he could perceive the material sensuality of felines, produced in him, along with ecstasy and admiration, avidity, desire, a mad longing to caress them. This was how temptations became part of his life, revolutionized it, filled it with secrets, anguish, fear, but also with startling moments of pleasure. And remorse and bitterness, of course. At the supreme moment, would God do the arithmetic? Would He pardon him? Punish him?
Demoralization overwhelmed him. It turned him into a being as helpless as the Congolese attacked by the tsetse fly and whose sleeping sickness prevented them from moving their arms, feet, lips, or even keeping their eyes open. Did it keep them from thinking as well? Unfortunately, these gusts of pessimism sharpened his lucidity, turned his brain into a crackling bonfire. The pages of the diary handed by the Admiralty spokesman to the press, which so horrified the red-faced assistant to Maître Gavan Duffy, were they real or falsified? He thought of the stupidity that formed a central part of human nature and also, naturally, of Roger Casement. He was very thorough and well known, as a diplomat, for not taking any initiative or the slightest step without foreseeing all possible consequences. And now, here he was, caught in a stupid trap constructed throughout his life by himself, giving his enemies a weapon that would sink him in disrepute.
Startled, he realized he was bellowing with laughter.
Illustration © Rachel Sim
