I wasn’t so sure all he’d been telling me was true, but either way this predecessor of mine struck me as an out-and-out bandit.
I wasn’t at all easy in my mind. “Another mess I’ve fallen into!” I said to myself with increasing conviction. I stopped talking with that thug. In one corner, stowed every which way, I found the merchandise he was leaving me, a few scraps of cotton goods … But loincloths and shoes by the dozen, some boxes of pepper, several lamps, a douche can, a staggering quantity of canned “Cassoulet à la Bordelaise,” and lastly a picture post card of the Place Clichy.
“Next to the ridgepole you’ll find the rubber and ivory I’ve bought from the niggers … I worked hard at first … And oh yes, here are three hundred francs … That’s what’s coming to you …”
Coming to me for what? I had no idea, but I didn’t bother to ask him.
“You may still be able to manage a bit of barter,” he said. “Because, you know, you’ll have no use for money out here, only when you want to clear out …”
He started laughing. Not wanting to cross him at the moment, I did likewise, I chimed in as if everything were hunky-dory.
In spite of the extreme destitution in which he’d been living for many months, he had surrounded himself with an elaborate domestic staff, consisting mostly of young boys, who fell all over themselves in their eagerness to bring him the household’s one and only spoon or the matchless cup, or to extract with consummate skill the classical and inevitable burrowing chiggers from the soles of his feet. In return, he would often oblige them with a kindly hand between their thighs. The only work I ever saw him do was scratching himself, but that, like the shopkeeper at Fort-Gono, he did with the marvelous agility that can be observed only in the colonies.
The chairs and tables he bequeathed me showed me what ingenuity can do with crushed soapboxes. That sinister individual also taught me how it is possible, for want of anything better to do, to propel those ungainly, caparisoned caterpillars which, quivering and foaming at the mouth, kept assailing our forest cabin, far into the distance with a short swift kick. God help you if you are clumsy enough to crush one. You’ll be punished with an entire week of intense stench, which rises slowly from that unforgettable mash. He had read somewhere that those horrible monsters were the oldest animals in the world, dating, so he claimed, back to the second geological period! “When we’ve come as far as they have, my boy, won’t we stink too?” His exact words.
The sunsets in that African hell proved to be fabulous. They never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental murder of the sun! But the marvel was too great for one man alone. For a whole hour the sky paraded in great delirious spurts of scarlet from end to end; after that the green of the trees exploded and rose up in quivering trails to meet the first stars. Then the whole horizon turned gray again and then red, but this time a tired red that didn’t last long. That was the end. All the colors fell back down on the forest in tatters, like streamers after the hundredth performance. It happened every day at exactly six o’clock.
Then the night set in with all its monsters and its thousands and thousands of croaking toads.
The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noisemakers, mutilated erections, horror. After a while we couldn’t hear each other talk in the hut. I had to hoot across the table like a hoot owl for my companion to understand me. I was getting my money’s worth. And remember, I didn’t like the country.
“What’s your name?” I asked him. “Did you say Robinson?”
He had just been telling me that the natives in those parts suffered horribly from every conceivable disease and that the poor bastards were in no condition to engage in any kind of trade. While we were talking about the natives, so many flies and insects, so large and in such great numbers, dashed against the lamp in such dense squalls that we finally had to put it out.
Before dousing the lamp, I caught a glimpse of Robinson’s face, veiled by a curtain of insects. That may be why his features impressed themselves more sharply on my memory, whereas before that they hadn’t reminded me of anything in particular. He went on talking to me in the darkness, while I retraced the steps of my past with the sound of his voice as a charm with which to open the doors of the years and months and finally of my days, wondering where I could have run into this man. But I found nothing. No answer. You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.
As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.
I was trying to identify this Robinson when gales of hideously exaggerated laughter, not far away in the night, made me jump. Then they fell silent. It must have been the hyenas he’d told me about.
And then there was nothing but the villagers and their tomtoms, those crazy drums made of hollow wood, termites of the wind.
The name Robinson gnawed at me more and more insistently. In the darkness we talked about Europe and the meals you can order if you’ve got the money, not to mention the drinks! so deliciously cool! Not a word about the next day, when I was to be left alone, for years perhaps, with all those cans of cassoulet … Would war have been better? No, worse! Definitely worse! … He thought so too … He’d been in the war himself … And nevertheless he was getting out of here … He was fed up with the forest, and that was that … I tried to bring him back to the war … But he wouldn’t oblige …
Finally, as we were getting ready for bed, each in his corner of that shambles of leaves and partitions, he came right out with it: he preferred the risk of being hauled into court for theft to living on cassoulet as he’d been doing for almost a year. Then I saw the lie of the land.
“Haven’t you any cotton for your ears?” he asked me … “If not, you’d better make some with the nap of a blanket and a drop of banana oil. You can make very nice little plugs that way … I for my part refuse to put up with the bellowing of those baboons …!”
Actually that concert had everything in it but baboons, but he clung to his inept generic term.
It suddenly occurred to me that this business with the cotton must be a cloak for some fiendish trick. I was seized with fear that he’d murder me there on my folding bed and make off with what was left in the money box … The idea paralyzed me. But what could I do? Call for help? Call who? The village cannibals? … I thought of myself as missing. Even in Paris a man without money, without debts, without hope of an inheritance, hardly exists, he’s missing to all intents and purposes … So what could I expect here? Who’d bother to come to Bikomimbo and even honor my memory by spitting in the water? Nobody of course.
Hours of intermittent terror. He didn’t snore. All those sounds, those calls from the forest made it hard for me to hear him breathe. No need of cotton. I kept puzzling, and finally the name Robinson revealed a body, a posture, a voice I had known … And just as I was giving in to sleep, the whole man stood before my bed, I held him fast, not him of course, but the memory of this Robinson, the man at Noirceur-sur-la-Lys in Flanders, who’d been with me on the fringes of that night when we went looking for a hole through which to escape from the war, and then the same man later in Paris … It all came back to me. Years passed in a few moments. I’d been unhappy, sick in the head … Now that I knew, now that I’d placed him, I couldn’t help it, I was thoroughly scared. Had he recognized me? In any case he could count on my silence and complicity.
“Robinson! Robinson!” I cried out cheerfully, as if I had good news for him. “Hey, old man! Hey, Robinson!” … No answer.
With pounding heart I got up, expecting a mean jab in the gut … Nothing. Then, rather bravely, I groped my way to the other end
of the shack, where I’d seen him go to bed. He was gone.
Striking a match now and then, I waited for daybreak. The day came in a burst of light and so did the black servants, laughing and offering me their enormous uselessness. At least they were cheerful, I’ll admit that. From the first, they tried to teach me the art of not giving a damn. I did my best to explain with a series of carefully studied gestures how terribly Robinson’s disappearance had me worried. No use. It was all the same to them. True, it’s senseless to worry about anything that isn’t right in front of your nose. What bothered me most about all this was the money box. But when someone walks off with a money box, you seldom see him again … I therefore decided that Robinson was most unlikely to come back and murder me. Which was that much gained.
So the whole landscape was mine! I’d have all the time I needed, I thought, to study the surface and the depths of this leafy immensity, this ocean of red, of mottled yellow, of flamboyant hams and head cheeses, magnificent no doubt for people who love nature. I definitely didn’t. The poetry of the tropics turned my stomach. The thought of all those vistas repeated on me like tuna fish. Say what you like, it will never be anything but a country for mosquitoes and panthers. And not for me.
I preferred to go back to my shack and fix it up in anticipation of the tornado that could not be long in coming. But I was soon obliged to abandon my attempts at reinforcement. The standard parts of the structure were amenable to further disintegration but defied repair, the vermin-infested thatch was coming apart, you couldn’t have made a decent urinal out of my home.
After I had described a few listless circles in the bush, the sun forced me to go back in and silently collapse. The same old sun! At the noon hour everything falls silent, everything is afraid of burning up. And it wouldn’t take much, grass, animals, and people are heated through. Meridian apoplexy.
My one and only chicken, bequeathed to me by Robinson, dreaded the noon hour the same as I did, he’d go back in with me. For three weeks the chicken lived with me like that, following me like a dog, clucking constantly, seeing snakes wherever he went. One day of extreme boredom, I ate him. He had no taste at all, his flesh had been bleached by the sun like an awning. Maybe he was what made me so sick. Be that as it may, the morning after that meal I couldn’t get up. Around noon, completely groggy, I dragged myself to the medicine chest. There was nothing in it but some iodine and a map of the Nord-Sud Métro.* I hadn’t seen a single customer in the store, only a few villagers who came to look-see, interminably gesticulating and chewing cola, ridden with sex and malaria. They gathered in a circle around me and seemed to be discussing my ugly mug. I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.
All the runners brought me from the Director in Fort-Gono was letters stinking with insults and idiocy, and threatening what’s more. Businessmen all think of themselves as big or little professional wizards, but in practice they usually turn out to be hopeless incompetents. My mother, writing from France, admonished me to take care of my health, as she had during the war. My head could be all set for the guillotine, and still my mother would scold me for forgetting my muffler. She never missed an opportunity to try and convince me that the world is a kindly place and that she’d done a good job in conceiving me. This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness. It was easy for me, I have to admit, to leave all my boss’s and mother’s hogwash unanswered, and the fact is I never did answer their letters. Clever of me, but it didn’t improve my situation.
Robinson had made off with almost everything that fragile edifice had contained, but who’d believe me if I said so? Write letters? What for? To whom? At about five every afternoon I shook with a violent fever, my bed jiggled and rattled as if I’d been vigorously jerking off. A bunch of blacks from the village had come to wait on me and taken possession of the hut; I hadn’t sent for them, but to send them away would have been too much of an effort. They squabbled over the remains of the stock, rummaged through the kegs of tobacco, tried on the last of the loincloths, felt the material, and took them off, adding, if that was possible, to the general disorder of my establishment. The rubber was all over the ground, mingling its juice with the bush melons and those sickly-sweet papayas that taste like pissy pears … I ate so many of them in place of beans that now, fifteen years later, the memory of them still turns my stomach.
I tried to gauge the degree of hopelessness to which I had fallen. I couldn’t. “Everybody steals!” Robinson had said to me three times before disappearing. The Director was of the same opinion. In my fever those words ran through me like shooting pains. “You’ve got to figure the angles!” He’d said that too. I tried to get up, I couldn’t make it. He’d been right about the water we had to drink, it was concentrated muck. Little black boys brought me bananas, big ones, little ones, red ones, and more and more papayas, but I was so sick of all that and everything else! I’d have vomited up the whole globe.
As soon as I felt a tiny bit better and not quite so dazed, I was seized again with a horrible fear, the fear that the Company would call me to account. What would I say to those devils? How would I get them to believe me? They’d have me arrested for sure! And who would try me? A bunch of special judges, something like a court-martial, armed with terrible laws they had gotten from God knows where, who never tell their real intentions and who for the sheer fun of it make you drag your bleeding steps up the steep path overlooking hell, the path that leads poor bastards to their death. The Law is a big Luna Park of suffering. When a poor man lets himself get caught in it, you’ll hear him screaming for centuries on end.
I preferred to lie there in a stupor, trembling and foaming at the mouth with a 104° fever, than to be lucid and forced to think of what would happen to me in Fort-Gono. I even stopped taking my quinine because I figured the fever would keep life away from me. You get drunk on what you’ve got. While I lay there sweltering, I ran out of matches. They’d been in short supply. Robinson hadn’t left me a thing, only “Cassoulet à la Bordelaise.” But plenty of that, I assure you. I threw up whole tins of it. And even to arrive at that result, you had to heat them.
The shortage of matches provided me with one little amusement, watching my cook light his fire with two pieces of flint and some dry grass. It was while I was watching him that the idea came to me. With plenty of fever added, my idea became wonderfully vivid. Though clumsy by nature, I was able after applying myself for a month to light a fire with two sharp stones like a savage. In short, I was learning how to make do under primitive conditions. Fire is the first thing; then there’s hunting, but I wasn’t interested in that. My flame was all I needed, and I practiced conscientiously. Day after day I had nothing else to do. I never got nearly as good at the sport of propelling those “secondary” caterpillars. I didn’t quite get the knack. I squashed a lot of them, and then I lost interest. I gave them the run of the house—like old friends. There were two big storms, the second went on for three days and, worse, for three nights. At last I had drinking water in the bucket, tepid to be sure, but even so … In the deluge the scraps of goods in my little stock began to run and intermingle, a disgusting mess.
Some of the natives obligingly brought me lianas from the forest to anchor my shack to the ground, but in vain; at the slightest wind, the leafy walls would flap wildly against the roof like wounded wings. There was nothing I could do about it. Never a dull moment.
Blacks big and small decided to join me in my downfall, they got more and more familiar. And they were so very happy. What fun! They came and went as they pleased in my so-called home. Freedom! As a sign of perfect understanding we exchanged signs. If I hadn’t had fever, I might have started learning their language. There wasn’t time enough. I made very good progress in fire-making, but I hadn’t yet mastered their best manner. I wasn’t very quick about it. Showers of sparks still flew into my eyes, which gav
e my black friends a good laugh.
When I wasn’t moldering with fever on my folding bed or working my primitive tinderbox, I thought of the Company’s accounts. It’s funny how hard it is to throw off one’s dread of irregular accounts. I’d undoubtedly inherited that from my mother, she’d contaminated me with her “He who steals a pin will steal a pound … and end up murdering his mother.” We all find it hard to throw off those ideas. We pick them up in childhood, and they come back to terrify us later on, in every crisis. Our only hope of getting rid of them is the force of circumstances! Luckily the force of circumstances is enormous. Meanwhile the store and I were sinking. One of these days we’d be swallowed up by the mud, which got thicker and more viscous with every downpour. The rainy season. What looked like a boulder yesterday was oozy molasses today. Tepid water fell in cascades from dangling branches and followed one everywhere, it invaded the hut and spread round about as in an old abandoned riverbed. The rain made a porridge of my merchandise, my hopes, and my accounts, and so did my fever, which was also very moist. The rain was so compact that when it hit you it stopped your mouth like a lukewarm gag. But the flood didn’t stop the animals from getting together, the nightingales started making as much noise as jackals. Anarchy all over the ark, and I a doddering Noah. This, I thought, had been going on long enough.
All my mother’s adages weren’t about honesty. As I remembered opportunely, she used to say when burning old bandages: “Nothing purifies like fire!” A mother leaves you something for every turn of Fate. You just have to take your pick.
Journey to the End of the Night Page 18
