Men, days, things—they passed before you knew it in this hotbed of vegetation, heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. Everything passed, disgustingly, in little pieces, in phrases, particles of flesh and bone, in regrets and corpuscles; demolished by the sun, they melted away in a torrent of light and colors, and taste and time went with them, everything went. Nothing remained but shimmering dread.
At last the freighter, which was to take me along the coast to the vicinity of my trading post, anchored within sight of Fort-Gono. The Papaoutah was her name. A small ship, wood-burning and flat-bottomed, built for estuaries. I was the only white on board, and they assigned me a small space between the kitchen and the toilet. We moved so slowly that at first I thought we were being cautious in getting out of the roadstead. But we never went any faster. This Papaoutah was incredibly short on power. We edged along within sight of the coast, an endless gray line tufted with small trees in the dancing heat mists. What a trip! The Papaoutah plowed through the water as slowly and painfully as if she herself had sweated it all. She would undo one little wave after another as cautiously as if they’d been bandages. The pilot, it seemed to me from a distance, must have been a mulatto; I say “seemed” because I never summoned up the energy to go up on the bridge and see for myself. Until about five o’clock I stayed in the shaded gangway, wedged in among the blacks who were the only passengers. If you don’t want the sun to burn your brains through your eyes, you have to blink like a rat. After five you can indulge in a look around—the good life. That gray fringe, that tufted country at the water’s edge, looked like flattened dress shields and didn’t appeal to me at all. The air was unbreathable, even at night it was hot, sultry, and salty. Everything was so cloying it raised my bile, what with the smell of the engine and in the daytime the water that was too brown on one side and too blue on the other. This was even worse than the Admiral Bragueton, minus of course the murderous officers.
At last we approached the port of my destination. Its name, I was told, was Topo. After coughing, spitting, and quaking on the surface of that oily dishwater for three times as long as it takes to eat four canned meals, the Papaoutah finally pulled up at the landing.
Three enormous thatched huts stood out from the shaggy banks. From a distance and at first glance the place was rather attractive. This, I was told, was the mouth of a big sandy river, which I was to mount by canoe on my way to the heart of the jungle. I was scheduled to spend only a few days here at Topo by the sea, just time enough to frame my last colonial resolutions.
We headed for a flimsy dock, and before reaching it the Papaoutah scraped a sand bar with its fat belly. Well I remember that dock, it was made of bamboo, a story in itself. They told me it had to be rebuilt every month, because of the tricky, nimble little mollusks that came by the thousands and ate it up. This endless rebuilding, in fact, was one of the heartbreaking occupations that weighed on Lieutenant Grappa,* Commander of the Topo station and the surrounding territory. The Papaoutah called only once a month, but a month was all the mollusks needed to eat up her dock.
As soon as I landed, Lieutenant Grappa took possession of my papers, checked them for authenticity, copied them into a virgin register, and invited me in for an apéritif. I was the first traveler, he informed me, to come to Topo in two years. Nobody came to Topo. There was no reason to come to Topo. Sergeant Alcide was Lieutenant Grappa’s second in command. In their isolation there was no love lost between them. “I always have to watch that subordinate of mine,” said Lieutenant Grappa at our first meeting, “or he tends to get too familiar.”
Since any happenings they might have imagined in that wilderness would have been too implausible (for what could happen in such a place?), Sergeant Alcide prepared in advance a whole sheaf of “Nothing to report” reports, which Grappa signed without delay, and the Papaoutah carried them away to the Governor General.
Among the lagoons round about and in the depths of the jungle several moth-eaten tribes lived in misery and stagnation, decimated and befuddled by trypanosoma and chronic poverty; even so, these tribes paid a small tax, collected of course with clubs. From among their younger set a few militiamen were recruited to wield these same clubs. The militia consisted of twelve men.
Lucky bastards! I know whereof I speak. I knew them well. Lieutenant Grappa equipped them in his own way and fed them regulation rice. One rifle for all twelve, but each had his own little flag. No shoes. But, since all things are relative and comparative in this world, the native recruits thought Grappa was treating them splendidly. Every day, in fact, he turned away volunteers and enthusiasts, young men who had had their fill of the bush.
The hunt in these parts didn’t yield much, and at least one grandmother a week was eaten for want of gazelles. At seven o’clock every morning Alcide’s militiamen reported for drill. Since I lived in one corner of his hut, where he had made room for me, I had a ringside seat for the fantasia. Never has any army in the world had more willing soldiers. In response to Alcide’s commands, those primitives would wear themselves out pacing the sand in columns of four, eight, and finally twelve, imagining they had packs, shoes, and even bayonets, and better still, going through the motions of using them. Barely emerged from a nature so vigorous and so close at hand, they wore nothing but an apology for khaki shorts. They had to imagine all the rest, and did. At Alcide’s peremptory command, these ingenious warriors deposited their imaginary packs on the ground and lunged into empty space to disembowel illusory enemies with illusory bayonets. Then, after simulating the unbuttoning of jackets, they would stack invisible rifles and in response to another sign, fling themselves with unfeigned passion into an abstraction of rifle drill. To see them disperse, gesticulating with studied precision, and lose themselves in intricate, epileptic, and insanely useless movements was deeply depressing. Especially when you remember that in Topo the raw, stiffling heat, so perfectly concentrated in that sand pit between the conjugated polished mirrors of the sea and the river, would have made you swear by your bleeding buttocks that you were being forced to sit on a chunk of sun that had just fallen off.
But these implacable conditions didn’t stop Alcide from sounding off. Not at all. Passing over the heads of his incredible drill squad, his roars, mounted to the tops of the venerable cedars at the edge of the jungle. And the thunder of his “Ten-shun!” reverberated still further, further still.
Meanwhile Lieutenant Grappa was administering justice. We’ll have more to say about that. Or from a distance, from the shade of his hut, he’d be supervising the ephemeral construction of his ill-fated dock. He had ordered complete uniforms and equipment for his recruits, and every time the Papaoutah showed up, he went down to the dock with sceptical optimism to take delivery. For two years he’d been clamoring for those uniforms. It may have been especially humiliating for Grappa as a Corsican to see that his militiamen were still stark naked.
In our hut, Alcide’s I mean, a small, semiclandestine trade was carried on in small objects and miscellaneous odds and ends. As a matter of fact, all the commerce of Topo passed through Alcide’s hands, for he and he alone possessed a small stock of tobacco, both packaged and in the leaf, several liters of brandy, and a few bolts of cotton goods.
It was plain that the twelve militiamen felt a real liking for Alcide though he chewed them out interminably and kicked their rear ends rather unjustly. But those nudist soldiers had discerned in Alcide the unquestionable signs of kinship, of fellow membership in the great family of the innately, incurably poor. Black or not, tobacco created a tie, it always does. I had brought a few newspapers with me from Europe. Alcide looked through them, trying to take an interest in the news, but though he tried three times to fix his attention on those ill-assorted columns, he couldn’t get through them. “You know,” he confessed to me after his vain effort, “I don’t really give a shit about the news anymore! I’ve been here for three years now!” It shouldn’t be thought that Alcide was trying to impress me by playing the hermit. Actuall
y, the ruthlessness, the manifest indifference of the whole world where he was concerned, had driven him, in his capacity as a re-enlisted sergeant, to regard the whole world outside of Topo as a distant planet.
Alcide was a good sort, obliging, generous and all. I realized that later, a little too late. He was crushed by his enormous resignation, that basic quality that makes it as easy to kill poor bastards in and out of the army as to let them live. Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
Around our hut, scattered over the lagoon of torrid pitiless sand, there were strange little flowers, fresh and short-lived, green, pink, or purple, the kind that in Europe you only see painted on certain pieces of porcelain, a kind of primitive no-nonsense morning glory. Closed on their stems, they endured the long abominable days, then opened in the evening and trembled in the first balmy breezes.
One day when Alcide saw me picking a little bunch of them, he warned me: “Pick them if you want to, but don’t water the little bitches, it kills them … They’re delicate, not at all like the sunflowers we used to grow for the army kids in Rambouil-let! … You could piss on them! … They’d drink anything! … If you ask me, flowers are like men … The bigger the dumber!” That was an obvious dig at Lieutenant Grappa, whose body was bulky and ramshackle, his hands short, purple, and terrifying. The kind of hands that would never understand anything. And indeed, Grappa made no attempt to understand.
I stayed in Topo for two weeks, during which I shared not only Alcide’s existence and food, his bed fleas and sand fleas (two species), but also his quinine and the inexorably tepid and diarrheic water of the nearby well.
One day when Lieutenant Grappa was feeling convivial he invited me to his house for coffee. Grappa was jealous, he never let anyone see his native concubine. Consequently, he picked a day when his Negress was visiting her parents in their village. It was also the day when his court of justice convened, and he wanted to impress me.
The motley mass of complainants and screeching witnesses had arrived early in the morning. In bright-colored loincloths they crowded around the hut. Defendants and mere public stood mixed helter-skelter, all smelling strongly of garlic, sandalwood, rancid butter, and saffron-scented sweat. Like Alcide’s militiamen, all these people seemed intent first and foremost on frenzied illusory motion; in transports of imaginary argument, they spewed castanet language and shook their clenched fists.
Deep in his creaking, groaning cane chair, Lieutenant Grappa smiled at all this assembled incoherence. He trusted for guidance in the post interpreter, who in a loud and barely intelligible mumbo-jumbo communicated unbelievable complaints.
Take, for instance, the one-eyed sheep that a certain girl’s parents refused to return despite the fact that their daughter, though married in due form, had never been delivered to her husband, because in the meantime the bride’s brother had somehow seen fit to murder the bridegroom’s sister, who had been guarding the sheep at the time. And many similar but even more complicated grievances.
Around us a hundred faces, impassioned by these questions of custom and interest, bared their teeth with little clicking or big gurgling sounds, black-African words.
The heat was nearing its height. I looked up past the edge of the roof to see if some disaster was approaching in the sky. Not even a storm.
“I’m going to straighten this whole thing out immediately!” Grappa finally declared; the heat and interminable palavers had driven him to a decision. “Where’s the bride’s father? Bring him here!”
“Here he is!” cried a dozen natives, pushing an elderly, decrepit-looking black man swathed with great dignity in a yellow pagne—Roman style—to the front. With one clenched fist the old man beat time to everything that was being said around him. He didn’t look as if he’d come to make a complaint, more likely he hoped for a bit of entertainment long after he’d given up expecting any tangible results from his lawsuit.
“All right,” said Grappa. “Twenty strokes! Let’s get this over with! Give this old pimp twenty strokes! That’ll teach him to pester me every Thursday for the last two months with his batty sheep story!”
The old man saw four husky militiamen coming toward him. At first he didn’t understand what they wanted with him, but then he began to roll his eyes, which were bloodshot like the eyes of a terrified old animal that has never been beaten before. He made no real attempt to resist, but neither did he know what position to take so the scourge of justice would inflict the least pain.
The militiamen pulled him by the toga. Two of them wanted him to kneel, but the other two told him to lie prone. In the end, they just laid him out on the ground any which way, lifted up his toga, and subjected his back and buttocks to a score of blows with a flexible rod that would have made a healthy mule bellow for a week. He wriggled and writhed, the fine sand spurted all around him mixed with blood, he spat sand as he howled, he made me think of an enormous pregnant basset bitch being tortured.
The public was silent while this was going on. All you could hear was the sound of the beating. When it was over, the old man, though half unconscious, tried to get up and cover himself with his Roman pagne. His mouth and nose and most of all his back were bleeding profusely. Droning their comments and chit-chat in funereal tones, the crowd led him away.
Lieutenant Grappa relit his cigar. In my presence, he affected an air of aloofness from these things. I don’t believe he was more Neronian than anyone else, but he disliked being obliged to think. That infuriated him. What exasperated him when performing his judicial functions was the questions he was asked.
The same day we witnessed another two memorable thrashings pursuant to further disconcerting reports of dowries taken back, poisonings threatened … promises unfulfilled … children of uncertain origin, etc.
“Oh!” Grappa cried. “If they only knew how completely cold their bickerings leave me, they’d stay in their jungle where they belong instead of chewing my ear off with their cock and bull stories! Do I bother them with my troubles?” But then he started on a different idea: “You know, I’m almost beginning to think those apes are developing a taste for my justice … For two years I’ve been trying to get them disgusted with it, but every Thursday they come back for more … Believe it or not, young man, it’s almost always the same ones who keep coming! … A bunch of perverts if you ask me!”
Then the conversation turned to Toulouse, where he spent all his leaves and where he was planning to settle in six years when he retired. It was all right with me. We had pleasantly arrived at the Calvados stage when we were disturbed again by a native who’d been sentenced the week before but was late in having his sentence carried out. Now, two hours after everyone else, he’d come of his own free will to get his thrashing. He’d been on the trail for two days and two nights, and he had no intention of going back to his village with his business undone. But he was late, and in matters of penal punctuality Grappa was uncompromising: “He asked for it! Why didn’t he wait his turn last time? … I sentenced the motherfucker to those fifty strokes last Thursday, not today!”
Still, the client protested, for he had a good excuse; he’d had to hurry back to his village to bury his mother. He had three or four mothers all to himself. Excellent arguments! …
“It will have to wait till the next session!”
But our client would barely have time for the trip to his village and back before the following Thursday. He went on protesting, he wouldn’t budge. It took several violent kicks in the ass to get that masochist out of the camp. They gave him some pleasure, but not enough … In the end he went to Alcide, who took advantage of the situation to sell him a whole assortment of tobacco, in the leaf, in packages, and in the form of snuff.
Well entertained by these various incidents, I took my leave of Grappa. It was time for his siesta, and he withdrew to the interior of his hut, where his native housekeeper, who had jus
t come back from her village, was already reclining. That black woman had a magnificent pair of tits, and she had been well schooled by the Sisters in Gabon. Not only did the young lady speak French (with a lisp), she also knew how to administer quinine in jam and to dig chiggers out of the soles of one’s feet. She knew a hundred ways of making herself agreeable to a white man without tiring him or by tiring him, whichever he preferred.
Alcide was waiting for me. He was rather miffed. It was probably the invitation with which Grappa had honored me that decided him to confide in me. What he told me was pretty strong stuff. Unasked, he modeled Grappa’s portrait in steaming cow flop. I replied that he had taken the words out of my mouth. Alcide’s vulnerable point was that in defiance of army regulations, which strictly forbade it, he was trading with the natives in the jungle round about and with his twelve militiamen as well. He mercilessly sold those people tobacco on credit. When payday came around, there was no pay for the militiamen to collect, they had smoked it all up. They smoked up advances. This petty irregularity, what with the rarity of cash in the region, hampered the collection of taxes.
Lieutenant Grappa was too cautious a man to provoke a scandal in Topo while he was in command, but he was definitely pissed off, maybe he was jealous. Understandably enough, he felt that whatever negligible sums of money the natives called their own should remain available to the tax collector. Each man to his taste and humble ambitions.
At first this system of credit against their pay had seemed rather strange and even outrageous to the riflemen, whose sole purpose in working was to smoke Alcide’s tobacco, but he had got them used to it by kicking them in the ass. By that time, they’d given up trying to collect their pay, they calmly smoked it up in advance, among the bright-colored flowers outside Alcide’s hut, between two stints of imaginary drill.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 16
