Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

All of that he would miss.

FOR DAYS HE DREAMED about Africa. He often spoke in Swahili; at times he seemed to be at the head of a column, shouting out orders that could be heard throughout the house. Once he awakened in a sweat, convinced that he had a pith helmet upon his head. His flannel undergarments were drenched with moisture, and his body throbbed from the impossible heat that rose in shafts from the jungle floor around him. He believed, in such moments, that he was a younger man again, and as such, reliving those discomforts did not bother him, for sooner or later, the small ecstasies of such journeys came back to Stanley as well. He would find himself perched on a ravine overlooking a waterfall, its spray shooting up great clouds of rainbowed mists that settled coolly and lovingly upon his face; or he would be on the fortieth day of a trek in the continuous twilight of a forest, bringing his column to a halt, astounded to discover a single radiant shaft of sunlight coming down through a clearing in the treetops, a cluster of tropical orchids gleaming like church lamps before him, God’s handiwork illuminating the darkness.

One afternoon when Stanley opened his eyes, in the corner of his bedroom was sitting his plump Irish nurse, praying over a rosary; then he saw Kalulu — no longer a pile of bones residing somewhere at the bottom of the Congo rapids but rather standing straight and tall at the foot of his bed, smiling. And this cheered him greatly:

“Kalulu, I am happy to see you again.”

“And I you, master.”

“But why have you come?”

“To bring you some water. Are you not thirsty?”

“I am.”

And with that Kalulu, wearing nothing more than a pair of linen pantaloons, drew from a water bag a cup’s worth, which he brought to Stanley’s parched lips; and then, as if to baptize him, he dampened his fingers with water and anointed Stanley’s brow and eyelids, as if in a gesture of final peace.

“Thank you, Kalulu. But why are you being so kind to me when it was because of me that you drowned in the rapids?”

“Even as I am dead and drowned, as you say, it was you who, in bringing me to London and to England, showed me a new world. I would never have seen it without you; and though I miss life itself I will never forget the things I have experienced.”

“Then you are not angry with me?”

“No, Bula Matari. I have only come to welcome you.”

In that parting, a simple embrace: Then a blink of the eyes, and Kalulu was gone.

STANLEY HAD NO AWARENESS that he might have set into motion a colonial machine that, as rumor had it, was responsible for the mutilation and death of hundreds of thousands of Congolese natives. The London Herald and Le Monde were writing continually of atrocities, and world opinion was shocked by the release of the Casement Report — but Stanley never saw it.

As his end approached, he was not bitter, only wistful at not being able to say good-bye to old friends. Among those he most dearly wished to see again was Samuel Clemens; he asked that Clemens’s books be placed beside him, and, in a final effort, he asked Dolly to write Clemens a letter to see if he might be persuaded to visit them in London.

Dear Samuel—

As I send you these words, I am on my way out of this nonsense. What you once described to me as the “lowly dirges of life” I have come to. God bless me, brother, if you can.

Then he began to fade.

From Lady Stanley’s Journal

IT WAS THIS MORNING, MAY 10, that my beloved died. But I had not expected it to come so soon, for we still held out hopes for his recovery. In those early hours, he suddenly cried out, “Oh, I want to be free! I have done all my work… I want to go home!” He told me then: “Good-bye, my sweet love; good-bye.”

STANLEY’S FUNERAL WAS HELD at Westminster Abbey on May 17; as with his and Dolly’s wedding, tickets were given out only by written request and at the discretion of the family. The nave was filled to capacity, and Stanley was carried toward the altar by a distinguished group of pallbearers — from the RGS, mainly: Arthur J. M. Jephson; David Livingstone Bruce; James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn; Alfred Lyall; George Goldie; Henry Hamilton Johnston; John Scott Keltie; and Henry Wellcome. The service had been appropriately respectful, and yet for all the ceremonial pomp and reverence accorded the old explorer, the abbey’s dean, Joseph Armitage Robinson, a man not entirely convinced of Stanley’s innocence in the “rape of the Congo,” had denied him the one honor that he had most wanted, which was to be buried alongside Livingstone. Later, his cortege wound through the crowd-lined streets in its silent and solemn march toward Waterloo station, whence his ashes were taken by train to Surrey and laid to rest in the cemetery of St. Michael and All Angels Church in Pirbright.

Thereafter, as the kind of woman hard put to openly grieve or even admit to any finality about death, Lady Stanley had at first devoted her energies to finding a monument appropriate to her late husband’s status as a “great man.” For three months she conducted a search for a monolith with which to mark the grave where Stanley’s ashes had been buried and, to that end, contracted a certain Mr. Edwards of the Art Memorial Company to scour the quarries, fields, and riverbanks of Dartmoor for a sufficiently grand stone, the kind that in the days of ancient practices would have been put up to mark the passing of a king — a druidic monolith that in its blunt majesty and permanence would fly in the face of the slight that had been rendered toward her husband by the sanctimonious powers that be. Various localities were visited — Moreton, Chagford Gidleigh, Walla Brook, Teigncombe, Castor, Hemstone, and Thornworthy — and thousands of stones were examined for their suitability; the search was a matter of such popular concern that many local farmers and their tenants joined in, with the happy result that by the summer a proper mass of granite, some twelve feet high and four feet wide and weighing six tons, had been located on a farm called Frenchbeer. Hauled to the churchyard and put up, its face bore the following inscription:

Henry Morton

Stanley

Bula Matari

1841–1904

Africa

Above the inscription was carved the symbol of life everlasting, a Christian cross.

Yours has just this moment arrived — just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country house visit we paid in England was to Stanley. Lord! how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days!

SAMUEL CLEMENS TO THE REVEREND TWICHELL, 1904

CLEMENS HAD BEEN SITTING on the veranda of his rented palazzo in Florence, the Villa Reale di Quarto, when he read in the late afternoon papers of Stanley’s death. By then, no bad news surprised him, for since he had taken up residence in that poorly heated and damp building, with its cavernous halls and chilly floors, few good things had happened. If there had been a high point, it had come with the singing recital that Clara had given in early April, but even then, his joy quickly vanished, for that same evening, Livy suffered a sudden heart seizure and would have died had not a subcutaneous injection of brandy revived her. Altogether, this sojourn in Italy, during which he had hoped to recapture the pleasantness of an earlier stay — one that took place some ten years before, at the Villa Viviani — had been a fiasco of discomforts. It rained continually, and daily fogs, like a “blue gloom,” enveloped the grounds so completely that their rose and holly garden — the most charming feature of the property — seemed, with its crumbling walls and arches, like a haunted cemetery. And their landlady, the Countess Massiglia, who lived in an apartment on the grounds, was a foul, proprietary, and bitter woman, seemingly bent on making their lives miserable. Despite the fact that she knew Clemens had arranged for a doctor to attend to the ailing Livy daily, she ordered her servants to keep the front gates locked so the physician would have to wait endlessly. When Clemens, complaining of bad odors that filled the lower floors, asked her to have the cesspools under the villa drained, she ignored him, and Clemens had to have his own dredgers come in. Incensed by this poor treatment, he was, in any case, already gravely distracted, for instead of helping Livy recover, that bleak and inhospitable Tuscan setting only seemed to have made her worse.