Through a scarlet haze I saw them coming and going in jerky lines. Some of these working shapes carried an extra black spot on their backs, those were mothers toting their babies along with their sacks of palm cabbage. I wonder if ants can do that.
“Doesn’t it always seem like Sunday here?” the Director joked. “So jolly! So colorful! And the females always naked. You’ve noticed? Good-lookers too, don’t you agree? Of course it seems strange when you’ve just arrived from Paris, I won’t deny it. And look at us! Always in white ducks. Like at the seashore! Aren’t we a sight for sore eyes? All dressed up for First Communion! It’s always a holiday here, take it from me! Day in and day out, just one glorious Fourteenth of July! And it’s like this all the way to the Sahara! Think of it!”
He stopped talking, sighed, grunted, said “Shit!” two or three times, mopped his forehead, and started in again.
“Out where the Company’s sending you, it’s deep in the bush. Very damp! … Ten days’ trip from here … First by sea … Then up the river … The river’s all red, you’ll see! … And on the other side it’s the Spaniards … The man you’re replacing at the post up there is a rotter … just between you and me … He simply won’t send us his accounts … Nothing we can do … we’ve sent him letter after letter! … A man doesn’t stay honest long when he’s alone! … You’ll see! … He’s written, says he’s sick … Big deal! Sick! I’m sick too! What does he mean sick? We’re all sick. You’ll be sick yourself before you know it! That’s no excuse! What do we care if he’s sick! … The Company comes first! When you get there, take inventory, that’s the essential! … There’s food enough for three months and merchandise for at least a year … You won’t run short! … Don’t start at night, whatever you do! … Be on your guard! … He’s got his own niggers, he’ll send them down the river to pick you up, maybe they’ll chuck you overboard. I bet he’s trained them! They’re as rascally as he is! Fact! He’s probably dropped a hint to those niggers about you! … That’s the kind of thing they do around here! And be sure to take your quinine with you, your own, get it before you leave! … He might doctor his, I wouldn’t put it past him!”
The Director thought he’d given me enough advice and stood up to say good-bye. The tin roof over our heads seemed to weigh at least two thousand tons, it absorbed all the heat of the day and sent it down on us. We were both making faces with the heat. We could just as well have dropped dead.
“Perhaps,” he said, “there’s no point in our meeting again before you leave, Bardamu! Everything wears one out so down here! Well, no, maybe I’ll run down to the warehouses before you go and see how you’re making out … You’ll hear from us when you get there … There’s a mail every month … The mail goes out from here … Well, good luck!”
And he vanished into the shadow between his tropical helmet and his jacket. I could clearly see the tendons in the back of his neck, curved like two fingers pressing against his head. He turned around again:
“Don’t forget to tell that loafer to come back here in a hurry … I’ve got a few things to say to him! … And not to waste time on the way! Oh, the rat! I only hope he doesn’t croak before he gets here! … That would be a shame! A bleeding shame! Oh, the blackguard!”
One of his blacks went ahead of me with a big lantern and took me to the place where I was to live before leaving for the Bikomimbo of my dreams.
We passed through avenues full of people who seemed to have come out for a stroll after dark. The night, hammered by gongs, was all around us, interspersed by brief snatches of song as incoherent as sobs, the big black night of the hot countries, with its brutal tom-tom heart that always beats too fast.
My young guide glided along easily on bare feet. There must have been Europeans in the bushes, you could hear them wandering about, their easily recognizable white men’s voices, aggressive and hypocritical. The bats came whirling and weaving through the swarms of insects attracted by our light. Under every leaf of the trees there must have been at least one cricket, to judge by the deafening din.
Halfway up a hill we were stopped at a crossroads by a group of native riflemen arguing around a coffin draped in a big French flag.
It was somebody who had died in the hospital, and they didn’t know exactly where to bury him. Their orders were vague. Some wanted to put him in one of the fields down below, some insisted on a garden at the top of the hill. The question had to be decided one way or the other, so the boy and I joined in the discussion.
In the end the pallbearers decided for the lower rather than the upper burial ground, because it was easier to walk downhill. Then we met three young white boys, the kind that in Europe go to rugby matches on Sunday, enthusiastic, noisy, pale-faced spectators. Like myself they were employed by the Societé Pordurière and were kind enough to show me the way to the unfinished shanty where my portable folding bed was temporarily situated.
The edifice when we got there was absolutely empty except for a few utensils and my so-called bed. As soon as I lay down on that wobbly filiform object, two dozen bats emerged from the corners and took to whishing back and forth like a volley of fans over my apprehensive repose.
The young black, my guide, came back to offer me his intimate services. Then, disappointed when I told him I wasn’t in the mood that evening, he offered to introduce me to his sister. I’d have been curious to know how he expected to find his sister in such darkness.
Not far away the village tom-tom chopped my patience into little bits. Thousands of hard-working mosquitoes took possession of my legs, but I didn’t dare set foot on the ground because of the scorpions and snakes which, I assumed, had started on their abominable hunting expeditions. The snakes had plenty of rats to choose from, rats were gnawing away at everything that can be gnawed, I heard them on the wall, on the floor, and quivering, ready to drop, on the ceiling.
Finally the moon rose, and things were a little quieter in the shanty. All things considered, life in the colonies was no great shakes.
Nevertheless, the next day came, a steaming cauldron. An enormous desire to go back to Europe took hold of me body and soul. Only one thing prevented me from clearing out—lack of money. That was enough. Anyway, I only had another week to spend in Fort-Gono before going to my job in Bikomimbo, which I’d heard described so delightfully.
The biggest building in Fort-Gono after the Governor’s Palace was the hospital. I ran into it wherever I went; I couldn’t walk a hundred yards in the town without coming across one of its pavilions, smelling faintly of carbolic acid. From time to time I ventured down to the docks to watch my anemic young colleagues, whom the Compagnie Pordurière recruited in France by emptying whole settlement houses, at work. They seemed possessed by a bellicose haste to unload freighter after freighter without stopping. “Harbor fees are so dreadfully costly!” they kept saying, sincerely distressed, as if it had been their own money.
They belabored the black porters with a will. They were conscientious, you couldn’t deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless soris-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son.
Those half-baked little specimens had come to tropical Africa to offer their flesh, their blood, their lives, their youth to their bosses, martyrs for twenty-two francs a day (minus deductions), and they were happy, yes, happy down to their last red corpuscle, for which ten million mosquitoes were lying in wait.
The colonies make these little clerks fat or make them thin; either way they hold them fast; there are only two ways to die under the sun, the fat way and the thin way. There’s no other. You may have a preference, but it’s your constitution that decides whether you get fat or whether the bones jab at your skin.
The Director up there on the red cliff, cavorting diabolicall
y with his Negress under the tin roof with the ten thousand kilos of sunshine on it would be no better off when his time was up. He was the skinny kind. Sure, he was putting up a fight. It looked as if he could beat the climate. Looked! In reality he was crumbling even faster than the others.
The story was that he’d thought up a beautiful scheme that would make him a fortune in two years … But he’d never have time to carry it out, even if he applied himself to defrauding the company day and night. Twenty-two directors before him had tried to make a fortune, each with his own system, like at roulette. All this was well known to the stockholders, who were keeping an eye on him from up above, still higher up, from the Rue Moncey in Paris. The Director made them laugh. How childish! The stockholders were the biggest bandits of all, they knew their Director was syphilitic and much too horny for the tropics, they knew he downed enough quinine and bismuth to burst his eardrums and enough arsenic to make his gums drop out.
In the Company’s bookkeeping the Director’s months were numbered, numbered like the months of a pig’s life.
My little colleagues never exchanged ideas. Only set formulas, baked and rebaked like dry crusts of thought. “Worry won’t get us anywhere!” they said. “Never say die! …” “The Director’s a jerk! …” “Nigger skin is good for tanning!” etc.
In the evening after work we’d meet for apéritifs with an “assistant manager,” a Monsieur Tandernot from La Rochelle. If Tandernot hobnobbed with the traders, it was only because they’d pay for his drinks. He was a pitiful case, stone broke. His position in the colonial hierarchy was the lowest possible, overseeing road construction in the middle of the jungle. His militiamen had clubs, and naturally the natives worked. But since no white man ever used the new roads that Tandernot built, and since the blacks preferred their own tracks through the jungle where it was harder to lay hands on them for tax purposes, and since Tandernot’s government roads didn’t actually go anywhere, they soon vanished under a dense growth of vegetation, from month to month if the truth be known.
“Believe it or not,” that astonishing pioneer would say, “last year I lost a hundred and twenty-two kilometers of them.”
During my stay, I only heard Tandernot boast about one thing, the one achievement he was humbly vain about: he was the only European capable of catching cold in Bragamance with the thermometer at a hundred and ten in the shade … That one distinction consoled him for many sorrows. “I’ve caught another rotten cold!” he’d announce proudly over his apéritif. “You don’t see that happening to anyone else!” And other members of our sickly group would cry out: “Good old Tandernot! What a man!” This little satisfaction was better than nothing. Where vanity is at stake, anything is better than nothing.
Another way the Company’s petty clerks amused themselves was putting on fever contests. It wasn’t difficult. These matches could go on for days, and they whiled away the time. When evening came and, almost always, the fever with it, they’d take their temperatures. “Hey, I’ve got a hundred and one!” … “Hell, that’s nothing. I can work up a hundred and three any time I feel like it!”
These readings were absolutely accurate and above board. By the light of hurricane lamps they’d compare thermometers. The winner would tremble and gloat. “I’m sweating so much I can’t piss,” said the most emaciated of the lot, a skinny young fellow from the Pyrenees, a champion of febrility who had come to Bragamance, so he told me, to get away from a seminary where he hadn’t enough freedom. But time was passing, and none of my companions could tell me exactly what species of freak the man I was replacing in Bikomimbo belonged to.
“He’s funny!” they told me, and that was all.
“When you start out in a job like that,” said the little Pyrenean with the high fever, “you’ve got to show what you’re good for! It’s all one way or the other. As far as the Director’s concerned, you’ll either be solid gold or solid shit! And another thing. He’ll judge you right away.”
I was very much afraid of being put down as “solid shit” or worse.
These young slave drivers, my friends, took me to see another employee of the Pordurière, who deserves special mention. He operated a store in the European quarter. Moldering with fatigue, oily and decrepit, he dreaded the slightest ray of light because of his eyes, which two years of uninterrupted baking under a tin roof, had dried out atrociously. It took him a good half hour every morning to open them, so he told me, and another half hour before he could see more or less clearly. Every ray of light was torture. A big mangy mole.
Suffocation and suffering had become second nature with him, and so had thieving. If he’d suddenly woken up healthy and honest, it would really have thrown him off balance. Even today, at this distance, I’d call his hatred for the Director General one of the most violent passions it has ever been given me to observe. At the thought of the Director, a violent rage would make him forget the pain he was in, and on the slightest pretext he’d rant and rave, all the while scratching himself from top to toe.
He never stopped scratching, in ellipses so to speak, from the lower end of his spinal column to the top of his neck. He dug furrows into his epidermis and dermis with his bloody fingernails, while continuing to wait on his numerous customers, most of them virtually naked blacks.
With his free hand he would plunge busily into various repositories to the right and left of him in the dark shop. Without ever making a mistake, deft and admirably quick, he would take out exactly what the customer wanted, stinking leaf tobacco, damp matches, cans of sardines, a ladleful of molasses, super-alcoholic beer in phony bottles, which he’d suddenly drop if overcome by the desire to scratch in the cavernous depths of his trousers. Then he would thrust in his whole arm, and it would emerge through the fly, which he always left partly open as a precaution.
He referred to the ailment that was eating away his skin by its local name, “corocoro.” “This miserable corocoro! When I think that the stinking Director hasn’t caught it yet, it makes me itch a hundred times worse! The corocoro can’t get a hold on him! … He’s too rotten already. That pimp isn’t a man. He’s a smell! … Pure unadulterated shit!”
When he said that, we’d all burst out laughing, the black customers too, in emulation. He frightened us a little. But he had one friend, a wheezing, graying little fellow who drove a truck for the Pordurière. He used to bring us ice that he’d stolen here and there from ships tied up at the wharf.
We’d drink his health at the bar, surrounded by the black customers, who looked on enviously. These customers were the more sophisticated blacks, who’d lost their fear of doing business with white men, a kind of elite so to speak. The other blacks, not so smart, preferred to keep their distance. Matter of instinct. But the most enterprising, the most contaminated of the blacks got taken on as clerks in the store. You could recognize the black clerks by the way they cursed and yelled at other blacks. My colleague with the corocoro traded in crude rubber, it came in sticky balls that the natives would bring in from the bush in big sacks.
While we were in the store, listening to him by the hour, a family of rubber gatherers came to the door and froze with timidity, the father in the lead, wrinkled, girt in a skimpy orange loincloth and holding his long machete.
The savage was afraid to come in despite the encouragements of one of the native clerks: “C’mon in, nigger! Come look see! We no eat savages!” Won over by these kind words, they stepped into the sweltering shack, at the back of which our corocoro man was ranting.
Apparently that native had never seen a store or possibly even a white man before. One of the women, with a big basket of crude rubber balanced on her head, followed him with downcast eyes.
Quickly the recruiting clerks grabbed her basket and put the contents on the scales. The savage didn’t know what the scales were about or anything else. His wife was still afraid to raise her head. The rest of the family waited outside. The clerk told them to come in, too bad if they missed the show.<
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That was the first time they had all trekked in from the bush to the white man’s town. It must have taken them a good long time to collect all that rubber. So naturally they were interested in the outcome. You hang little cups on the trunks of the trees, and the rubber oozes into them very very slowly. Sometimes you don’t get so much as a small glassful in two months.
After the weighing, our scratcher dragged the bewildered native behind the counter, did a little reckoning with a pencil stub, and shoved a few coins into the man’s hand. Then he said: “Beat it! That’s it!”
All his little white friends were convulsed to see how cleverly he had handled the transaction. The black man stood there by the counter, looking lost in his skimpy orange underdrawers.
One of the black clerks yelled at him to wake him up: “You no savvy money? You savage?” This clerk knew his onions, he was used to these peremptory transactions, he had probably been trained. “You no speakie French?” he went on. “You missing link, eh? … What you speakum anyway? Couscous? Mabillia? Jackass! Bushman! You heap big jackass!”
The savage just stood there with his hand closed on his coins. He would have run away if he had dared, but he didn’t dare.
“What you buy with dough?” the scratcher put in. “I haven’t seen such a jughead in a long time! He must have come a long way.—What you wait for? Gimme that dough!”
He grabbed the money, and in place of the coins gave the black man a bright green handkerchief that he had deftly spirited from some secret hiding place under the counter.
When the black man hesitated to leave with the handkerchief, the scratcher went a step further. He certainly knew all the tricks of the conqueror’s trade. Shaking the big square of muslin before the eyes of a wee black child, he said: “Ain’t it pretty, you little turd? Did you ever see one like it, little sweetie, little stinkpot, little fart?” And one-two-three he tied it around the child’s neck. Now the child was dressed.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 14
