“Captain!” I replied, putting into my voice all the conviction of which I was capable under the circumstances. “What an extraordinary mistake you are in danger of making! You! Me! How can you think me capable of such ignominious sentiments? How monstrously unjust! Indeed it is more than I can bear! When only yesterday I was fighting for our beloved country! When over the years my blood has mingled with yours in innumerable battles! Oh, Captain, sir, how could you think of crushing me beneath such an injustice?”
Then, addressing the whole group:
“What abominable slander has abused you, gentlemen? Leading you to imagine that I, to all intents and purposes your brother, would dream of spreading foul calumnies about heroic officers! This is too much! Really too much!” And I went on: “Oh, for such a thing to happen at the very moment when these heroes, these incomparable heroes, are preparing to resume, with what courage I need not say, their sacred duty of safeguarding our immortal colonial empire! Where the most glorious soldiers of our race have covered themselves with eternal glory. The Mangins!* the Faidherbes!* the Galliénis!* … Oh, Captain! To suspect me! Of this!”
At that point I pulled up short. I hoped my silence would impress them. Luckily it did for a moment. Thereupon, without delay, taking advantage of the oratorical armistice, I went straight up to the captain and, in an access of emotion, gripped both his hands.
With his hands enclosed in mine I felt fairly safe. Still clasping them, I continued, as volubly as ever, and while assuring him that he was right, a thousand times right, suggested that we make a fresh start, but get our signals straight this time. This unbelievable misunderstanding, I assured him, had been brought about by my stupid though natural timidity! I admitted that my behavior could reasonably have been interpreted as unconscionable disdain by the ladies and gentlemen present, these “heroes and charmers … this providential conclave of astounding characters and talents … Not forgetting the incomparably musical ladies, the ornaments of our good ship! …” After making this profuse and elaborate apology, I implored them to admit me without delay or restriction to their joyous patriotic brotherhood … in which I hoped, now and forever, to cut an admirable figure. And of course without releasing the major’s hands, I redoubled my eloquence.
As long as a soldier isn’t killing, he’s a child and easily amused. Since he is not in the habit of thinking, it costs him a crushing effort to understand when spoken to Captain Frémizon wasn’t killing me, he wasn’t drinking, and he wasn’t doing anything with his hands or feet. He was only trying to think. For him that was much too much. In short, I’d caught him by the head.
Gradually, during this ordeal by humiliation, I felt my self respect weakening, weakening a little more, seeping away, and finally abandoning me completely, officially as it were. Say what you please, that’s a beautiful moment. After that incident I became infinitely light and free, morally speaking of course. Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot. Since that day I’ve never felt the need of any other weapons, or virtues for that matter.
The captain couldn’t make up his mind, and his friends, who had come there expressly to wipe up my blood and play knucklebones with my dispersed teeth, had to content themselves with catching words in mid-air. The civilians who had come rushing, tingling with eagerness at the news of an impending corrida were looking very dangerous. Since I didn’t know exactly what I was talking about, but only that I’d better keep it lyrical at all costs, I held on to the captain’s hands and stared at an imaginary point in the cottony fog through which the Admiral Bragueton was making its way, puffing and spitting from one turn of the propeller to the next. Finally, to wind up my harangue, I ventured to raise one arm above my head, releasing one of the captain’s hands, but only one, and flung myself into my peroration: “Gentlemen: Aren’t we all agreed that brave men will always come to an understanding in the end? So damn it all, Vive la France! Vive la France!” That was Sergeant Branledore’s gimmick. And once again it worked. That was the only time France ever saved my life, otherwise the opposite has been closer to the truth. I observed a moment’s hesitation in my audience—after all, it’s hard for an officer, however ill-disposed, to strike a civilian who has just shouted “Vive la France!” as loud as I had. That hesitation saved me.
I reached into the group of officers, grabbed two arms at random, and invited everybody to come to the bar and drink to my health and our reconciliation. The heroes resisted for barely a minute, and then we drank for two hours. But the females, silent and increasingly disappointed, kept their eyes on us. Through the portholes of the bar I saw the obstinate school-teacher-pianist prowling like a hyena, surrounded by other females. The bitches had a strong suspicion that I’d conned myself out of the trap, and were determined to nab me at the next turn. Meanwhile, men among men, we went on drinking under the useless but stupefying electric fan, which since the Canaries had been wearing itself out churning the tepid, cottony atmosphere. Still, I had to keep up my verve and spout the kind of talk … nothing too difficult … that would appeal to my new friends. For fear of putting my foot in it, I overflowed with patriotic admiration, and kept asking those heroes, one after another, for stories and more stories of colonial feats of arms. War stories, like dirty stories, appeal to the military of all countries. The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There’s no such thing as intelligent vanity. It’s an instinct. And you’ll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination. It was enough to appear impressed. It’s easy to ask for more and more war stories. Those boys were crammed full of them. It was like the good old hospital days. After each story I made sure to express my approbation, as Branledore had taught me, with a glowing phrase: “Splendid! Why, that deserves to go down in History!” There’s a formula that can’t be beat! Little by little, the group I had wormed my way into decided that I was all right. They started telling, the same kind of cock-and-bull war stories as I had heard in the old days and later dished out myself in imagination contests with my pals in the hospital. Except their setting was different, their fairy tales happened in the jungles of the Congo instead of the Vosges or Flanders.
Once Captain Frémizon, the one who a moment before had volunteered to purge the ship of my putrid presence, perceived that I listened more attentively than anyone else, he began to give me credit for no end of delightful qualties. His arterial flux seemed attenuated by the effect of my original praises, his vision cleared, his bloodshot, alcoholic eyes even began to sparkle despite his besotted state, and the sprinkling of doubts about his own worth, which he had somehow conceived deep within him and which assailed him in times of extreme depression, were for a time adorably dissipated by the miraculous effect of my intelligent and pertinent comments.
No doubt about it, I was a creator of euphoria! I had them slapping their thighs for all they were worth! I alone knew how to make life worth living in spite of the agonizing humidity! Wasn’t I the most inspired of listeners?
As we were thus shooting the shit, the Admiral Bragueton began to slow down, she seemed to be making hardly any headway; not an atom of breeze around us, we must have been skirting the coast, moving as sluggishly as if the sea had been molasses.
The sky above us was molasses too, a black, viscous mass that I eyed hungrily. I’d have liked best to get back into the night, even sweating and groaning, no matter how! Frémizon went on and on with his stories. I had the impression that land was near, but my plan for escape filled me with alarm … Gradually our conversation ceased to be military and became first ribald, then frankly filthy, and in the end so incoherent that it was hard to keep it going. One after another of the company gave up and fell asleep, crushed under the weight of their
snores, a nasty kind of sleep that scraped the caverns of their noses. That was the time to get away. One must never miss up on those remissions of cruelty that nature manages to impose on the most vicious and aggressive of this world’s organisms.
By then we were anchored a short distance from the coast. All we could see of the shore was some lanterns moving back and forth.
Very quickly a hundred bobbing canoes full of screeching black men came crowding around the ship. There were black men all over the decks, offering their services. In a few seconds I carried the few bundles I had done up in secret to the gangway and slipped down it behind one of the boatmen, whose features and movements were almost entirely hidden from me by the darkness. At the bottom of the steps, on a level with the plashing water, I wondered anxiously where we were going.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“At Bambola-Fort-Gono,”* the shadow answered.
We pushed off and paddled hard. To make us go faster I helped him.
I had time to get one last look at my menacing fellow passengers. In the light of the cabin lamps, laid low by apathy and gastritis, they grunted and fermented in their sleep. Bloated and sprawling, they all looked alike now, officers, civil servants, engineers, and traders, pimply, potbellied and swarthy, intermingled and more or less identical. Dogs look like wolves when they’re asleep.
A few moments later I was back on land. Under the trees the night was thicker than ever, and behind the night lay all the complicities of silence.
In this colony of Bambola-Bragamance the Governor reigned triumphant over everybody. His soldiers and civil servants hardly dared breathe when he deigned to let his eyes fall on them.
Far below these notables, the resident traders seemed to thieve and thrive more easily than in Europe. Not one coconut, not one peanut in the entire colony evaded their brigandage. As fatigue and ill health overcame the civil servants, it began to dawn on them that they’d been had, that all they had gained by being sent out here was braid and forms to fill out and very little pay. So naturally they looked at the traders with a bilious eye. The military faction, even more dull witted than the other two, subsisted on a diet of colonial glory, washed down by quantities of quinine and miles of red tape.
Understandably, a life spent waiting for the thermometer to go down made everybody more and more cantankerous. The consequence was private and collective quarrels, preposterous and interminable, between the military and the administration, between the administration and the traders, between these two in temporary alliance and the military, between the whole lot of them and the black population, and finally between blacks and blacks. The little energy that hadn’t been sapped by malaria, thirst, and the heat was consumed by hatred so fierce and deep seated that it wasn’t uncommon for these colonials to drop dead on the spot, poisoned by themselves like scorpions.
Nevertheless, this virulent anarchy was held in check, like crabs in a basket, by a hermetic police structure. The civil servants griped in vain, for the Governor, to keep his colony in subjection, was able to recruit all the moth-eaten mercenaries he needed, impoverished blacks driven to the coast by debts, defeated by the law of supply and demand, and needful of something to eat. These recruits were taught the law and how to admire the Governor. The Governor seemed to wear all the gold in his treasury on his uniform … in the blazing sunshine, it surpassed belief, even without the plumes.
He went to Vichy for the cure every year, and he never read anything but the Official Gazette. A number of the civil servants cherished the hope that he’d sleep with their wives some day, but the Governor didn’t care for women. He didn’t care for anything. He survived each new epidemic of yellow fever like a charm, while so many of the men who’d have liked to bury him died like flies at the first whiff of fever.
There was a story that one Fourteenth of July, as he was reviewing the troops of the Residency, caracoling up ahead of his Spahi guards who were carrying a flag as big as a house, some sergeant, delirious with fever no doubt, rushed out in front of him, shouting: “Get back, you jerk!” It seems the Governor was very much upset by this outrage which, as it happened, was never satisfactorily explained.
It is hard to get a faithful look at people and things in the tropics because of the colors that emanate from them. In the tropics colors and things are in a turmoil. To the eye, a small sardine can lying upon the road at midday can take on the dimensions of an accident. You’ve got to watch out. It’s not just the people who are hysterical down there, objects are the same way. Life only becomes tolerable at nightfall, but then almost immediately the darkness is taken over by swarms of mosquitoes. Not one or two or a hundred, but billions of them. Survival under those conditions is quite an achievement. A carnival by day, a colander by night, a quiet war.
When the hut you sleep in has filled at last with silence and the air is almost fit to breathe, the termites, those loathsome beasts eternally engaged in eating away the uprights of your cabin, get to work. The day a tornado hits this treacherous filigree, whole streets will go up in dust.
The town of Fort-Gono where I’d landed, the capital of Bragamance, was perched precariously between sea and jungle, but supplied, adorned, so to speak, with enough banks, brothels, cafés, café terraces, and even a recruiting office, to make it a small metropolis. There was even a Place Faidherbe and a Boulevard Bugeaud,* in case you wanted to take a walk. The whole was a clump of gleaming edifices surrounded by jagged rocks, riddled with larvae, trampled by generations of soldiers, and officials.
At about five o’clock the military element would grouse and gripe over their apéritifs, the price of which, as it happened, had just gone up when I arrived. A delegation of consumers was about to petition the Governor to issue a decree enjoining the café owners from playing fast and loose with the prices of absinthe and cassis. If some of the regulars were to be believed, the very foundations of colonization were threatened by ice. Indeed it cannot be denied that the introduction of ice into the colonies has sparked off a process of devirilization. Riveted by force of habit to his iced apéritif, the colonial could no longer hope to dominate the climate by stoicism alone. The Faid-herbes, the Stanleys, the Marchands,* be it noted in passing, had nothing but good to say of the tepid, muddy beer, wine, and water they drank for years without complaining. There you have it. That’s how colonies are lost.
I learned plenty more in the shade of the palm trees which, all along those avenues of precarious dwellings, throve in provocative contrast. It was only that garish raw greenery which prevented the place from looking exactly like La Garenne-Bezons.
At nightfall the native hookers came out in strength, wending their way between clouds of hungry mosquitoes armed with yellow fever. There were Sudanese girls as well, offering the passerby the treasures under their loincloths. For extremely moderate prices you could treat yourself to a whole family for an hour or two. I’d have liked to flit from twat to vagina, but necessity obliged me to look for work.
The director of the Compagnie Pordurière* du Petit Congo, so I heard, was looking for an inexperienced man to take charge of one of the trading posts in the bush. I went without delay to offer my incompetent but enthusiastic services. The director’s reception of me was not exactly friendly. That lunatic —I may as well call a spade a spade—lived not far from the Government House in a spacious straw bungalow built on piles. Before even looking at me, he fired several questions about my past, then, somewhat appeased by my naïve answers, his contempt took a more indulgent turn. Still, he did not yet see fit to offer me a seat.
“To judge by your papers, you know something about medicine?” he observed.
I replied that I had indeed studied for a time in that field.
“It’ll come in handy,” he said. “How about some whisky?”
I told him I didn’t drink. “Smoke?” Again I declined. Such abstinence surprised him. In fact he scowled.
“I’m suspicious of employees who don’t smoke and dr
ink … Are you a pederast by any chance? … No? Too bad! … They don’t steal as much … That’s been my experience … They get attached … Well,” he was kind enough to hedge. “By and large I seem to have noticed that quality, that advantage, in pederasts … Maybe you’ll prove me wrong …” And changing the subject: “You’re hot, aren’t you? You’ll get used to it. You’ll have to. How was your trip?”
“Uncomfortable!” I said.
“Well, my friend, you haven’t seen a thing. Come and tell me what you think of this country when you’ve spent a year in Bikomimbo, the place where I’m sending you to replace that joker …”
His Negress, squatting beside the table, was fiddling with her feet and scraping them with a little piece of wood.
“Beat it, you slut!” her master flung at her. “Go and call the house boy! And get me some ice while you’re at it!”
The boy took his time coming. Infuriated, the Director sprang to his feet and received him with two brutal slaps in the face and the same number of resounding kicks in the gut.
“These people will be the death of me,” the Director predicted with a sigh and slumped back into his armchair that was covered with dirty, rumpled, yellow canvas.
“Look, old man,” he said, suddenly grown friendly, as though liberated for a while by his access of brutality. “Would you mind handing me my whip and my quinine … there on the table … I oughtn’t to get so excited … It’s stupid to fly off the handle like that …”
From his house we overlooked the river port, which shimmered through dust so dense, so compact, that we heard the clanking and thumping more clearly than we could see what was going on. On the shore files of black men were busy, encouraged by whips and curses, unloading hold after hold of ships that were never empty, climbing up flimsy, teetering gangplanks with big baskets balanced on their heads—like vertical ants.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 13
