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

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

XI

When the fat sheriff opened the door of his cell, came in, and without saying a word sat on a corner of the cot where he was lying, Roger was not surprised. Ever since the sheriff violated the rules and permitted him to take a shower, he had felt, without a word passing between them, a rapprochement with the jailer who, without realizing it, perhaps in spite of himself, had stopped hating him and holding him responsible for the death of his son in the trenches in France.

It was dusk, and the small cell was almost dark. Roger, from the cot, saw the very still shadow of the sheriff’s wide, cylindrical silhouette. He heard him panting deeply, as if exhausted.

“He had flat feet and could have avoided active duty,” he heard him say in a monotone, pierced by emotion. “At the first recruitment center, in Hastings, they rejected him when they examined his feet. But he didn’t accept that and went to another center. He wanted to go to war. Whoever heard of anything so crazy?”

“He loved his country, he was a patriot,” Roger said quietly. “You ought to be proud of your son, Sheriff.”

“What good does it do that he was a hero if he’s dead now,” the jailer replied in a lugubrious voice. “He was all I had in the world. Now, it’s as if I stopped living too. Sometimes I think I’ve turned into a ghost.”

In the shadowy cell it seemed to him the sheriff sobbed. But perhaps it was a false impression. Roger thought of the fifty-three volunteers of the Irish Brigade who remained in Germany, in the small military camp of Zossen, where Captain Robert Monteith had trained them in the use of rifles and machine guns, in tactics and military maneuvers, trying to keep their morale high in spite of an uncertain situation. And the questions he had asked himself a thousand times tormented him again. What did they think when he disappeared without saying goodbye, along with Captain Monteith and Sergeant Bailey? That they were traitors? That after entangling them in a rash adventure they had gone to fight in Ireland, leaving them surrounded by barbed wire, in the hands of the Germans, and hated by the Irish prisoners in Limburg, who considered them turncoats and disloyal to their comrades who had died in the trenches of Flanders?

Once again he told himself that his life had been a permanent contradiction, a series of confusions and cruel complications, where by chance or because of his own clumsiness, the truth of his intentions and actions was always obscured, distorted, turned into a lie. Those fifty-three pure, idealistic patriots, who’d had the courage to confront more than two thousand of their comrades in the camp at Limburg and join the Irish Brigade to fight “beside but not inside” the German army for the independence of Ireland, would never know about the titanic struggle Roger had waged with the German military high command to keep them from

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