The whole family stared at the child, decked out in the green cotton object … There was nothing more they could do, because the handkerchief had come into the family. They could only accept it, take it, and go.
They all backed slowly out. They crossed the threshold. When the father, who was last, turned around to say something, the sharpest of the clerks, who was wearing shoes, helped him leave with a swift kick in the ass.
The entire little tribe stood silently on the other side of the Avenue Faidherbe, under the magnolia tree, watching us finish our apéritifs. It looked as if they were trying to understand what had happened to them.
The corocoro man was treating us. He even played his phonograph for us. You could find anything in his store. It made me think of the supply depots in the war.
As I’ve told you, there were lots of blacks and small whites like myself working in the warehouses and plantations of the Compagnie Pordurière du Petit Togo at the same time as me. The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.
Wielding a club is fatiguing in the long run. The white men’s hearts and minds, on the other hand, have been crammed full of the hope of becoming rich and powerful, and that costs nothing, absolutely nothing. We’ve heard enough about Egypt and the Tatar tyrants! In the art of squeezing the last ounce of labor out of a two-legged animal, those primitive ancients were pretentious incompetents! Did they ever think of calling their slave “Monsieur” or letting him vote now and then, or giving him his newspaper? And especially had they thought of sending him to war to work off his passions? After twenty centuries of Christianity (as I personally can bear witness) your modern man simply can’t control himself when a regiment passes before his eyes. It puts too many ideas into his head.
Accordingly, I decided to keep a close watch on myself from then on and learn to keep my mouth scrupulously shut, to conceal my longing to get away, in short, to prosper if possible and come what may, in the service of the Compagnie Pordurière. Not a moment to lose.
Alongside our warehouses, on the muddy river banks, whole nests of crocodiles, insidious and unmoving, lurked in wait. Built of metal, they enjoyed the delirious heat, and so apparently did the blacks.
At midday you couldn’t help wondering if all this bustle of toiling masses, this hubbub of screeching, overexcited blacks on the docks was possible.
To learn the secret of numbering sacks before taking to the bush, I had to submit to gradual asphyxiation in the Company’s main warehouse along with the other clerks, between two scales wedged into the alkaline crowd of ragged, pustulous, singing black men. Each one of them drew a little cloud behind him and shook it in cadence. The dull thuds of the overseers’ clubs descended on their magnificent backs without provoking the least complaint or protest. Dazed and passive, they suffered pain as unquestioningly as the torrid air of that dusty furnace.
The Director came by from time to time, always aggressive, to make sure I was mastering the techniques of numbering sacks and falsifying weights.
With sweeping blows of his club he cleared his path to the scales through the press of natives. “Bardamu,” he said to me one morning when he was in high spirits. “You see these niggers all around us? … Well, when I came to Little Togo almost thirty years ago, those loafers still lived by hunting, fishing, and intertribal massacres! … I was a small trader then … Well, as true as I’m standing here, I’d seen them coming home to their village after a victory, loaded with more than a hundred baskets of bleeding human flesh to stuff their bellies with! … Hear that, Bardamu? … Bleeding! … Their enemies! A feast! … Today, no more victories! We’ve accomplished that much! … No more tribes! … No more flimflam and foolishness! Today we’ve got a labor force and peanuts! Good hard work! No more hunting! No more guns! Peanuts and rubber! … To pay taxes with! Taxes to get us more rubber and peanuts! This is life, Bardamu! Peanuts! Peanuts and rubber! … And say … Well, I’ll be damned. There’s General Tombat!”*
True enough, he was coming our way, an old man crumpling under the enormous weight of the sun.
The general wasn’t exactly a soldier anymore, but he wasn’t exactly a civilian either. Confidential agent of the Pordurière, he took care of liaison between the Administration and the business community, an indispensable function although the two lived in a state of permanent competition and hostility. But the general was a shrewd maneuverer. For instance, he had disentangled a shady deal in enemy holdings, which had been judged inextricable in high places.
At the beginning of the war General Tombat’s ear had been split, not very badly, just enough to get him honorably retired after Charleroi.* He had immediately offered his services to “Greater France.” But long after Verdun,* that epic battle was still on his mind. He was always shuffling a handful of telegrams. “Our little poilus will hold on! They are holding on!” It was so hot in the warehouse and France was so far away that we could have done without General Tombat’s predictions. But just to be polite we all, and the Director with us, declared in chorus. “They’re marvelous!” On these words Tombat left us.
A few moments later the Director opened up another violent path through the tightly packed torsos and vanished in his turn into the peppery dust.
The Director had eyes like glowing coals, he was consumed with a passion to hornswoggle the Company. He frightened me a little, and I had difficulty in getting used to his presence. I found it hard to believe that in all the world there could be a human carcass capable of such maximum-tension greed. He seldom said anything to us straight out, he spoke only in muffled hints, and he seemed to live and breathe for the sole purpose of conspiring, spying, and betraying. I was told that he stole, swindled, and peculated incomparably more than all the other officials put together, and they were no slouches, I assure you. But I can easily believe it.
During my stay in Fort-Gono, I had a little leisure in which to roam around. The only really desirable spot I came across in the whole town was the hospital.
Whenever you get to a new place, certain ambitions turn up inside you. My ambition was to be sick, just plain sick. Every man to his taste. I walked around those promising hospital pavilions, so doleful, withdrawn, and unmolested, and I never relinquished their antiseptic charm without regret. The lawns around them were brightened by furtive little birds and anxious multicolored lizards. An earthly Paradise in its way.
As for the blacks, one soon gets used to them, their sluggish good nature, their slow gestures, and the protuberant bellies of their women. Those blacks stink of their misery, their interminable vanities, and their repugnant resignation; actually, they’re just like our poor people, except they have more children, less dirty washing, and less red wine.
When I’d finished inhaling and sniffing at the hospital, I followed the native crowd and stopped for a while outside the pagodalike edifice near the fort that a restaurant owner had built for the entertainment of the sexy young jokers of the colony.
The prosperous whites of Fort-Gono went there at night and gambled doggedly, meanwhile drinking and yawning and belching with a will. For two hundred francs you could lay the luscious patronne. The young jokers had a lot of trouble with their trousers when they wanted to scratch, because their suspenders kept sliding off.
At night big crowds poured out of the native huts and collected around the pagoda, never weary of seeing and hearing the whites jigging around the mechanical piano as off-key waltzes wheezed from its moth-eaten strings. When she heard the music, a blissful look came over the patronne, meaning that she felt like dancing.
After trying in vain for several days, I managed to have a few talks with her in private. Her periods, she confided, lasted no less than three weeks. Fault of the tropics. In addition, her customers wore her out. Not that they made love very often, but since drinks at the pagoda were on the expensive side, they tried to get their money’s w
orth by pinching her ass something terrible before leaving. That was what wore her out mostly.
As a competent businesswoman, the patronne knew all the gossip of the colony, all the desperate love affairs that transpired between the fever-harried officers and the handful of civil servants’ wives, they too menstruating interminably and languishing for days on end in the deep reclining chairs of their verandas.
The streets, offices, and shops of Fort-Gono were awash with mutilated desires. To do everything people did in Europe despite the abominable temperature and their own progressive, insurmountable decay seemed to be the prime obsession, satisfaction, and grimace of those maniacs.
The fences could hardly contain the swollen, wildly aggressive vegetation of the gardens; the rampant foliage molded delirious lettuces around the houses, those chunks of dried-out egg white, in which some jaundiced European was rotting away. All along the Avenue Fachoda,* the liveliest and most fashionable street in Fort-Gono, there were as many overflowing salad bowls as Government officials.
Every night I went to my no doubt unfinished shack, where my skeleton of a bed had been put up by my depraved boy. He set traps for me, he was as sensual as a cat, he wanted to become part of my family. I, however, was haunted by other, far more pressing preoccupations, especially by my plan to take refuge for a while in the hospital, the only armistice within my reach in that torrid carnival.
In peace as in war, I took no interest at all in futile pastimes. Even the sincerely and eminently obscene offers that came to me through the boss’s cook struck me as colorless.
For the last time I made the rounds of my young friends at the Pordurière, trying to cull some information about that disloyal employee, the one I had orders to replace at all costs in the bush. Empty chit-chat.
Nor did I learn anything substantial in the Café Faidherbe at the end of the Avenue Fachoda, abuzz at the twilight hour with hundreds of slanders, rumors, and calumnies. Nothing but impressions. Whole dustbins full of impressions were overturned in that half-light encrusted with multicolored lamps. Shaking the lace of the giant palm trees, the wind blew clouds of mosquitoes into the customers’ saucers. The Governor, thanks to his exalted rank, figured prominently in the discourse round about. His inexpiable crumminess was the mainstay of the apéritif conversation in which the nauseated colonial liver seeks relief before dinner.
At that hour all the cars in Fort-Gono, ten in all, drove back and forth past the café. They never seemed to go very far. The Place Faidherbe had the characteristic atmosphere, the overdone decor, the floral and verbal excess, of a subprefecture in southern France gone mad. The ten cars left the Place Faidherbe only to come back five minutes later, having once more completed the same circuit with their cargo of anemic Europeans, dressed in unbleached linen, fragile creatures as wobbly as melting sherbet.
For weeks and years these colonials passed the same forms and faces until they were so sick of hating them that they didn’t even look at one another. The officers now and then would take their families for a walk, paying close attention to military salutes and civilian greetings, the wives swaddled in their special sanitary napkins, the children, unbearably plump European maggots, wilted by the heat and constant diarrhea.
To command you need more than a kepi; you also need troops. In the climate of Fort-Gono the European cadres melted faster than butter. A battalion was like a lump of sugar in your coffee; the longer you looked the less you saw. Most of the white conscripts were permanently in the hospital, sleeping off their malaria, riddled with parasites made to order for every nook and cranny in the body, whole squads stretched out flat between cigarettes and flies, masturbating under moldy sheets, spinning endless yarns between fits of painstakingly provoked and coddled fever. Poor bastards, they were having a rough time, a pitiful crew in the soft half-light of the green shutters, re-enlisted men soon fallen from celebrity, side by side—the hospital was mixed—with civilians, all hunted men in flight from the bosses and the bush.
In the apathy of those long malarial siestas, the heat is such that the flies also rest. From bloodless, hairy arms on both sides of the beds dangle grimy books, all in tatters. Half the pages are missing because of the dysentery cases, who never have enough paper, and also because of the sourpuss nuns, who have their own way of censoring wicked books. The military crabs victimize the nuns as much as everybody else. When they want a good scratch, they lift up their habits behind the screen where this morning’s stiff is still so hot that he hasn’t yet managed to grow cold.
Depressing as the hospital was, it was the only place in the whole colony where you could feel forgotten, safe from the people outside, the bosses. A vacation from slavery, that was the main thing, anyway the only happiness within my reach.
I made inquiries about the requirements for admission, the habits and idiosyncracies of the doctors. By that time the prospect of leaving for the bush filled me with despair and thoughts of revolt; already I was planning to contract every available fever as soon as possible, to return to Fort-Gono desperately ill and so emaciated, so repulsive that they’d not only have to take me, but also to ship me back to France. I already knew some wonderful tricks for getting sick, and I was learning special new ones for the colonies.
I prepared to overcome a thousand difficulties, for neither the directors of the Compagnie Pordurière nor the military authorities were easily discouraged from tracking their chill-racked, cadaverous prey and pouncing on them as they played cards between the pissy beds.
They would find me resolved to rot with whatever disease proved necessary. Unfortunately you didn’t usually stay in the hospital for long, unless you wrote finis there to your colonial career once and for all. Sometimes the toughest and smartest of the fever patients, those with the greatest strength of character, managed to slip aboard a transport bound for France. That was a happy miracle. Most of the hospital patients gave up, recognized that the regulations had defeated them, and went back to the bush to lose what weight they had left. If the quinine relinquished them to their maggots while they were still in the hospital, the chaplain would simply close their eyes at about six in the evening, and four Senegalese would carry the bloodless husks to the plot of red clay beside the church in Fort-Gono. That church, incidentally, was so hot under its tin roof that you never went there twice, more tropical than the tropics. To stand up in that church you’d have to pant like a dog.
That’s the way it goes. You can’t deny it, men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.
I tried here and there to get a little more information, a few facts to go by. Because what the Director had told me about Bikomimbo seemed incredible. Apparently the place was an experimental trading post, an attempt to penetrate the bush, at least ten days’ journey from the coast, isolated in the midst of the natives and their jungle, which had been described to me as an enormous reservation, crawling with animals and diseases.
I wondered if my young friends at the Pordurière, who oscillated between aggressiveness and extreme depression, weren’t simply jealous of me. Their idiocy (which is all they could call their own) varied with the amount of liquor they had ingested, the letters they had received, and the amount of hope they had lost during the day. As a general rule, the more moribund they felt, the more they swaggered and strutted. If they’d been ghosts (like Ortolan at the front) their gall would have known no bounds.
Our apéritifs went on for three whole hours. We always talked about the Governor, the pivot of all our conversations; then we talked about possible and impossible swindles, and lastly about sex: the three colors of the colonial flag. The civil servants present made no bones about accusing the military of wallowing in peculation and abuse of authority, but the military paid them back in kind. The traders, for their part, regarded all these prebendaries as hypocritical imposters and bandits. A rumor that the Governor was being recalled had been in circulation every morning for the past ten year
s, yet the delightful telegram announcing his disgrace never arrived, and this in spite of the at least two anonymous letters mailed to the Minister for the Colonies each week, imputing a thousand meticulously described atrocities to that local tyrant.
The blacks are lucky with their onion skins; the white man, encased between his acid sweat and his tropical shirt, poisons himself. It’s not safe to go near him, I’d learned my lesson on board the Admiral Bragueton.
In only a few days I heard some sweet stories about my Director! His past was as full of low dodges as a prison in a seaport town. His past had just about everything in it, including, I imagine, some magnificent miscarriages of justice. True, his looks were against him, his face had the terrifying look of an undeniable murderer, or rather, to be fair, the look of a reckless man in a terrible hurry to get ahead—which amounts to the same thing.
If you passed by at siesta time, you might see, sprawled in the shade of their houses on the Boulevard Faidherbe, a few white women, the wives of officers or settlers, who were even more devastated by the climate than the men, frail creatures with pleasingly hesitant voices, infinitely indulgent smiles, their pallor coated with rouge, as though happy on their deathbeds. These transplanted middle-class women showed less courage and pride of bearing than the patronne of the Pagoda, who had no one but herself to lean on. The Compagnie Pordurière consumed quantities of small clerks like me, every year it lost dozens of these subhumans in the jungle trading posts not far from the swamps. Pioneers!
Every morning the Army and Business came to the office of the hospital, whimpering and begging for their men. Not a day went by but some captain came threatening and calling down God’s thunders on the Head Physician to make him send those three malarial card-playing sergeants, and two syphilitic corporals back to their units on the double, because how could he put a company together without noncoms? If told that his gold-bricks were dead, he’d stop bothering the hospital management and go back to the Pagoda for a few more drinks.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 15
