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

palm oil, and copper throughout the Upper Congo. Foreigners who worked for the International Congo Society, like Roger, were transferred to the SEE and their old jobs taken over by Belgians. Roger worked for the Sanford Exploring Expedition for 150 pounds a year.
    He began in September 1886 as an agent in charge of stores and transport in Matadi, which means “stone” in Kikongo. When Roger moved there, the station built along the caravan route was little more than a jungle clearing opened with machetes on the banks of the great river. Four centuries earlier the caravel of Diego Cão sailed that far, and the Portuguese navigator had carved his name on a rock, still legible today. A firm of German architects and engineers began to build the first house out of pine imported from Europe—importing wood to Africa!—and docks and depositories, work that one morning—Roger clearly recalled the mishap—was interrupted by a sound like an earthquake and the eruption into the clearing of a herd of elephants that almost made the new settlement disappear. Roger spent six, eight, fifteen, eighteen years seeing the tiny village that he began building with his own hands to serve as a depository for the merchandise of the SEE expand, climbing the gentle hills nearby, enlarging the colonists’ squared, two-story wooden houses with long terraces, conical roofs, small gardens, windows protected by metal screens, and filling with streets, corners, and people. In addition to the first small Catholic church in Kinkanda, now in 1902 there was another, more important one, the Church of Notre Dame Médiatrice, and a Baptist mission, a pharmacy, a hospital with two physicians and several nursing nuns, a post office, a beautiful railroad station, a commissary, a court, several customs depots, a solid wharf, and shops selling clothing, food, canned goods, hats, shoes, and farming implements. Around the colonists’ city a variegated district of Bakongo huts of reeds and mud had arisen. Here in Matadi, Roger told himself at times, the Europe of civilization, modernity, and the Christian religion was much more present than in Boma, the capital. Matadi already had a small cemetery on Tun-duwa Hill, next to the mission. From that height it overlooked both banks and a long stretch of the river. Europeans were buried there. Only natives who worked as servants or porters and had an identification pass circulated in the city and along the wharf. Any others who violated those limits were expelled from Matadi forever, after paying a fine and receiving some lashes with a chicote . In 1902, the governor-general still could boast that in Boma and Matadi not a single robbery, homicide, or rape had been recorded.
    Roger would always remember two events from the two years he worked for the Sanford Exploring Expedition, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four: the months-long transport of the Florida along the caravan route from Banana, the tiny port at the mouth of the Congo River, to Stanley Pool, and the incident with Lieutenant Francqui: for once breaking the serenity of his even temper, joked about by Herbert Ward, he almost threw Francqui into the whirlpools of the Congo River and escaped being shot by the lieutenant only by a miracle.
    The Florida was an imposing ship the SEE brought to Boma to serve as a merchant vessel in the Middle and Upper Congo, that is, on the other side of the Crystal Mountains. Livingstone Falls, the chain of cataracts that separated Boma and Matadi from Leopoldville, ended in a cluster of whirlpools that earned the name Devil’s Cauldron. Starting there and going east, the river was navigable for thousands of miles. But to the west it lost a thousand feet in height as it descended to the ocean, making the river impassable for great distances. In order to be carried by land to Stanley Pool, the Florida was disassembled into hundreds of pieces that, classified and packed, traveled on the shoulders of native porters for the