One Another by Gail Jones

Author:Gail Jones [Gail Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2023-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

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In June 1890 Joseph travels to the Congo on a three-year contract. He leaves six months later, almost destroyed. Most readers have heard of Heart of Darkness, and more too of the explosive Wagnerian version, ostensibly set in Vietnam. But these bear little relation to the history of an entire people looted, degraded, enslaved and murdered. Nor to this man, this would-be writer, bleeding from the anus and retching bile in the jungle. He is doubled over in disgust at both himself and the world. He glances up and sees a dense canopy of shifting green and there is no solace here, no shelter, only menace and shadow.

He has followed a ghost, his murdered predecessor, the handsome Dane, Captain Freiesleben. In the novel the Dane is described neutrally as a pile of neat bones, his tidy ribs threaded in pastoral fancy by high waving grass. But the historical captain is still unburied after three months. His hands and feet have been cut off; his clothes have been taken away, his blond hair removed and tied in a band around his disintegrating face. This is the account of a missionary; Joseph uses his fiction to disguise. He begins his new job with diligent stoicism, but before long his body is ill and his conscience is appalled. He is stricken with revulsion as he counts and measures piles of ivory, watched over by Camille Delcommune, manager of the Kinshasa station, who, with his hard curled moustache and his habitual brutality, is the monster Joseph tries all his life to expunge.

‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.’

There is a colonial photograph in which Alexandre Delcommune (brother of the monster) stands with his hands on his hips beside a gross pile of twelve hippopotamus heads. This is a culture of the trophy. This is the reduction of living meaning to dead numbers and fleshy piles.

The Delcommunes hack off the hands of their slaves as punishment, or to take possession of their rings. And this is the least of their atrocities.

Joseph makes the thousand-mile journey up the river to Stanley Falls and back again in a shonky steamer he describes as a biscuit tin. On the return trip one of the agents, Klein, dies, and Joseph once again falls pitifully ill.

Tadeusz sees that his nephew’s handwriting is changed and thinks that his condition must be dire. And so it is. His symptoms are many and his health is grave. When, barely alive, he returns from the Congo, he is admitted to the German Hospital at Dalston in London, recorded as ‘Johann Conrad’, given an incorrect age and described as a ‘Master Mariner’ born in ‘Poland, Russia’.

After Joseph’s unlikely survival Uncle Tadeusz arranges hydropathic therapy in Champel-les-Bains on the outskirts of Geneva. The water cure is rigorous, involving hot- and cold-water douches and a miserable diet. Guy de Maupassant, suffering syphilis, arrived at the same establishment shortly after Conrad left, and described the treatment as brutal.

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