by Maryse Conde
Exasperated, Hakim pushed his way to the royal dais. Koffi Ndizi was overweight, susceptible to inexplicable bouts of suffocation that alarmed him a lot. Like Hakim, he was in no mood to listen to the nonsense from his entourage. Three nights in a row, Zokpou, his senior fetish priest, had had dreams of ill-omen. The first night he had seen vultures swooping down on an impala and devouring it raw. On the second night an anthill over fifteen feet tall had suddenly crumbled into dust. On the third night the Ebrié lagoon was dyed red with blood. Zokpou had concluded that a succession of moons, portents of strange events, would be seen in the kingdom. But what would happen, he did not know. He did know, however, that for once it would not be the fault of the French. Besides, what more could they do? They had already turned Koffi Ndizi into a toothless, maneless lion.
Koffi Ndizi motioned to Hakim to approach. He liked the schoolteacher, always ready to run down his enemies, the French. He was well familiar with his tendencies, but was easygoing, having groped a good many boys in his youth. Together with incest, sodomy is a king’s privilege. For two years he had been plotting unsuccessfully to overthrow Thomas de Brabant, the governor’s deputy, a poker-faced individual who had two obsessions: building roads and railways. Next to the Romans, de Brabant would say, the French were the people who best realized the importance of roads. He was responsible for countless fathers being snatched from their homes to break stones under the sun. Koffi Ndizi and Hakim had tried to hide a mamba in a drawer of his desk and bribe his cook to poison his meals. Once they had buried a doll in his image in the entrails of a black cat. Nothing doing!
Hakim sat down on a corner of the mat he was offered and recounted his latest readings, for the king, however much a king, could neither read nor write. In India, the British did not attack the traditional authorities. They formed alliances and governed hand in hand with the local powers.
Why did the French have to put everything to the fire and the sword?
2
Alix Pol-Roger, the governor, had gone to negotiate a site for installing a French presence in the northern territories, and Thomas de Brabant had replaced him. Given his character, this suited him perfectly. He had the power to decide, resolve, and take the law into his own hands. Cases were no longer referred to the native courts. Thomas meddled in the most sordid family affairs and poked his nose into the most tangled legal issues of land ownership. That very morning he was struggling with a problem. What a piece of bad luck! Monsieur Desrussie was dead! He was an unsavory character. But useful. Who was going to look after the children in the Home now? The officials who had not yet taken their place in the graveyard were overloaded with work. Recruit a director from the metropole? Out of the question! The ministry refused to spend a cent on the new colony. He thought he ought to walk over to the Home and settle any remaining business. He donned his pith helmet, grabbed his umbrella, striped in the colors of his country’s flag, and headed out.
Thomas de Brabant had been appointed to the Ivory Coast three years ago. Like the bulk of the administration, he had been transferred from Grand-Bassam to Adjame-Santey and missed the ocean breeze and the smell of salt of the former capital. The Ivory Coast had been his first posting on graduating third from the school for senior officials for France’s overseas territories. Aged twenty-nine, he was married, but had had to leave his wife behind. The colonies, which are already hard on men, are lethal for women. The females of the species become dried, parched, and finally wilt. Charlotte, then, had remained on the fourth floor of a handsome building on the avenue Henri-Martin in Paris, the Brabant family being extremely well-to-do. During his annual leave, Thomas had returned to perform his conjugal duty, and ever since, with the faraway Charlotte and little Ludivine in his thoughts, he never forgot to take his quinine. His high position prevented him, so he thought, from having affairs with African women. As a result, he slept alone, eaten up with all kinds of desires, for the very women who were off-limits had a certain troubling effect on him.
It had been raining, of course, since morning. At four in the afternoon the sky skimmed so low, it was almost dark. A scarlet stream surged down the middle of the winding track, and Thomas had not walked more than a few yards before his high leather boots were covered in mud. A soaked flag wrapped around a bamboo mast signaled the school next to the church. Despite this patriotic rag, Thomas knew full well what was going on behind the hedge of seccos. His spies had informed him of what Hakim was teaching his older pupils, and the entire mission had him under surveillance. As soon as they had collected enough evidence against him, he would be shooed out! In one clean sweep! Never mind he was an administrator’s bastard! At that very moment Hakim emerged from the school, surrounded by a group of young boys. With his jute bag folded into a hood over his head and his crumpled clothes, he looked anything but a scholar with a particular appreciation for the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. Thomas and Hakim avoided each other’s gaze and continued on their way, one toward the Home, the other walking down to the lagoon and the king’s compound.
The Home for Half-Castes on the plateau of Adjame-Santey was a one-story building in a sorry condition. Yet it had been built according to the plans of the famous architect Sebastien Depelchin, who had set an example by abandoning there a dozen of his café-au-lait offspring. Behind the main building stood the house of the late director and his widow, one of the few converted Ebriés. The living room, transformed into a mortuary, was deserted except for a group of officials’ wives feigning affliction. The widow was sobbing noisily on the breast of a young stranger who was very black of skin and whose hair was not crinkled but straight, brushed into a chignon and twisted into a long braid as thick as your arm. Dressed in the European manner, a black silk polka-dot scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her full lips were painted mauve, her eyelids blue. Yet all this makeup was too garish, as if it had been smeared on by the hand of a novice. Thomas was wondering who she could be when she introduced herself: Celanire Pinceau, arrived the day before. He wasn’t expecting anything like this. The oblate, who was the talk of Adjame-Santey, looked like a hetaera. She simpered in a French, perfumed here and there with an exotic accent and punctuated with unusual expressions. Anybody would have been struck by her color. For she came from a remote French colony, Guadeloupe. She had lost both her parents, maman and papa, when she was small. So she had been taken in by the Sisters of Charity and raised under their care in Paris. She owed her entire education to them: certificate of higher education; diploma for general and religious instruction. And so on. And so on. She had always been at a loss to understand why for three centuries the missionaries had passed Africa by, sailing around the continent, hardly stopping, on their way to the Indies, China, and Japan. Fortunately, the African Missionary Society had been founded and set up a women’s branch. She had thus been able to fulfill her dream: to spread the Holy Name of God on this destitute continent. Thomas, doubting by nature, wondered immediately what she could be hiding behind this inane speech. Her eyes, which were burning into him, contradicted the platitudes coming out of her mouth. She couldn’t care less about Africa, evangelism, and her vocation! She had everything she needed to obtain whatever she wanted. Her voice turned beseeching: what was to become of her, now that her director had passed on so unfortunately? Was she going to be sent back to Paris? No, of course not, no, no, Thomas hastened to add. She would take over from Monsieur Desrussie. His mind was made up. He had not seen her references, but apparently they were impeccable. He would speak to the governor as soon as he got back. She could put her mind to rest!
Meanwhile, summoned by the king, Hakim was entering Koffi Ndizi’s compound. Locked away in his private quarters, the latter was conversing through an interpreter with a man draped in a burnoose, a dress seldom seen in this coastal region: Diamagaram, a Muslim fetish priest, come down from Kong. When Hakim entered, Koffi Ndizi dismissed the interpreter, since the schoolteacher spoke perfect Malinke. Seated with the Holy Book open in front of him, Diamagaram had
also made a cabalistic drawing in a tray filled with sand and was deep in concentration. He could see that evil spirits had recently set foot in Adjame-Santey, terribly malevolent spirits who had crossed over from the other side of the ocean. This was particularly surprising, since spirits never travel over water. They are frightened by this moving expanse inhabited by cold-blooded creatures, and you can hear their roars of anger and helplessness from the shore as they watch their prey escaping them. If they had set foot in Adjame-Santey, this meant they had mounted a “horse.” That’s the word for a human who obeys their every wish and who can be recognized by a sign. The aim therefore is to discover this sign, to find this “horse” and stop it from causing any harm, not an easy task. Diamagaram confessed that he had chased a “horse” in Bondoukou for months bearing a tiny sign on the body: two toes joined together. Getting the better of a “horse” requires extraordinary sacrifices. Not your ordinary chickens. Neither sheep nor even oxen. No, we’re talking albinos. Children born with a caul. Twins. Prepubescent girls. Koffi Ndizi made it known he would do anything. He stared at the fetish priest, visibly impressed by his gift of the gab, his heavy string of beads, and his thick Koran.
At that moment Kwame Aniedo, the heir to the throne, a magnificent sixteen-year-old specimen, crawled in on all fours, as was the custom. He begged forgiveness from his father for daring to disturb him. But this too was an urgent matter. Three royal concubines, one leaving behind her an infant still at her breast, had left the compound without the queen mother’s permission. They had refused to say where they had spent the afternoon. How many whiplashes should they be given?
At six in the morning, before the sun had opened its lazy eyes, before the women had lit the wood fires and heated the water for the men to wash, a piece of news was flying from mouth to mouth. The oblate, whom Thomas de Brabant had just appointed director of the Home for Half-Castes while awaiting the governor’s approval, was recruiting. There was nothing extraordinary about recruiting! The French never stopped. They recruited to build roads, bridges over rivers, railways, wharfs, sawmills, brick factories, and lighthouses. The surprising fact about this new case was that she was recruiting only girls, and what’s more, she was paying them. She handed each of them a small sum of money on the spot—enough to buy wrappers and head ties at the CFAO company store, soap, perfume, and talcum powder at Karamanlis’s.
There was a rush to the Home.
Standing in the middle of the garden, Celanire was examining each candidate as if she were back in a slave market. From their teeth to the soles of their feet. Then, with the help of Desrussie’s widow, turned interpreter, she switched to the interrogation. Did the candidate have a husband? A betrothed? Did she have any children? Girls? Boys? How many? At the end of the inspection, which lasted a full day, she recruited about fifteen girls whom she assembled under the mango trees together with the little half-castes. A nursery, she explained, would be set up for the under-threes, who would now no longer be left to dribble and poop, like they used to be. The one-class school would be enlarged. Pupils would wear khaki cotton uniforms on weekdays and white ones on Sundays. Girls old enough to hold a needle would learn sewing, but this would not constitute the basis of their education. They would learn the same subjects as the boys. However, on Thursdays and Saturdays the boys would clear the wasteland around the Home to make it into palm groves. They would also plant a kitchen garden and grow tomatoes, eggplants, and cabbages. Together with the chickens and sheep they would raise, the Home should be self-sufficient in a year or two at the most. Is that understood? Dismiss!
At day’s end Celanire confided in her newfound friend, the widow Desrussie. She had never got over losing her darling little papa, and he was constantly in her thoughts. He was a splendid half-caste, a mulatto as they were called in the Caribbean, as good as he was handsome. A man of duty whose only passion was science. He conducted experiments on animals and had led a lone crusade against the ravages of opium introduced into the island by Chinese laborers. She described Guadeloupe as a paradise perfumed with the scent of vanilla and cinnamon. Despite her naïveté and her love for a good story, the widow Desrussie, like Thomas de Brabant, guessed that Celanire was not telling the truth. This woman was hiding something. They suspected she was more dangerous than a mamba. Her plans for the Home were troubling, for the land around it did in fact belong to someone. It belonged to the Ebriés.
If Karamanlis had not insisted, Hakim would never in his life have accepted Celanire’s invitation. The Home for Half-Castes had too many bad memories for him. They spewed up a whole chapter of his childhood. But ever since the Greek had caught sight of the oblate in the depths of her tipoye, he raved about her to anyone who entered his store. He who was so miserly would give back the wrong change and could no longer sleep a wink at night. In short, he begged Hakim to strike up an acquaintance with the object of his desire so that he could get closer to her later on. For he knew that as a common trader, and a foreigner into the bargain, he would never be invited to the Home. Hakim therefore brilliantined his hair and slipped on a white caftan.
Within a few weeks the Home had been changed out of all recognition. The wind sang through the branches of a budding bamboo grove. Pink cassias, magnolias, and bushes of croton grew in profusion. In the drawing room downstairs, where a host of oil lamps cast broad daylight over everything, a rather formal reception was in full swing, and Hakim found himself ill dressed for the occasion. Even if nobody was dancing, a phonograph was playing the latest tangos and paso dobles from Paris. Every senior civil servant and factory manager whom Adjame-
Santey could muster was present—not forgetting a handful of officers on leave. These men, starved of women, devoured with their eyes the pretty young African girls serving red wine and beer. Celanire, extravagant in her makeup and wearing her eternal choker around her neck, was keeping watch over the occasion. She wore a silk dress whose plunging neckline was in danger of pushing her breasts out into full view. The last straw for Hakim was the way Thomas de Brabant behaved as the perfect host. He was wearing his ceremonial dress of white cotton trousers and a jacket of the same color, adorned with epaulettes and sleeves embroidered with gold facing on a black background. The sheath of his saber swung against his hips. His thick hair was brushed back away from the forehead, and he was drawing on a Havana as he hugged Celanire to his side. What was going on between those two? Hakim knew that, by order of the interim governor, land belonging to Koffi Ndizi had been confiscated for the benefit of the Home. But he had never had the opportunity of seeing Thomas and Celanire side by side. It was crystal clear: they were lovers and sleeping together. Thomas had finally unearthed the black woman educated in the ways of the West who would allow him to satisfy his desires. Hakim, stunned by his discovery, suddenly found himself face-to-face with the woman filling his thoughts. With a smile Celanire offered him a glass of beer, which he refused with such an abrupt gesture that he sent it crashing to the floor. By no means offended, she offered him another glass while her eyes, roughly smeared with kohl, gave him such an urgent, inviting look that poor Hakim’s blood froze. He was a Muslim, he stammered, and never drank alcohol. A Muslim, really? She burst out laughing as if she had heard a good joke. Then she went on to interrogate him. He was a schoolteacher, wasn’t he? How many pupils were there at the mission? Hakim managed to regain a semblance of voice. About a dozen, all sons of local chiefs. It was the aim of the administration and its acolytes, the priests, to make hostages out of the dignitaries’ children. Hostages? At the word, she laughed again, apparently amused by his barb. Fortunately, Thomas de Brabant came to put an end to this tête-à-tête. Hakim rushed outside. The warm rain and familiar din of the night insects calmed him down. What exactly was he afraid of? This was not the first time a woman had made known her intentions toward him. The life of a homosexual is strewn with these pitfalls. While he was trying to reason with himself, three couples emerged from the drawing room. One of the girls was propping up her escort,
who kissed her greedily at the base of her neck. The others were pawing each other unashamedly. They disappeared under the arcaded veranda, reappeared, and mounted the monumental staircase, which enlaced two frangipani trees between its ramps.
Where were they going?
A crazy suspicion burgeoned in Hakim’s mind. He dashed up the steps as fast as he could. The staircase came out onto a landing that disappeared into a corridor, plunged into darkness at this hour. The couples had vanished into the night. He opened a door haphazardly, and the inimitable smell of childhood wafted out: a dormitory. That was not what he was looking for. He closed the door behind him, walked around and around on the landing looking foolish, and then went back down to the drawing room. Nobody now was intimidated by the tango and paso doble. The African girls were dancing, following the lead of their escorts and laughing at the outrageous music. The only other place of this kind was at Jacqueville, where an African by the name of Latta Ahui had built a hut for dancing. Only those familiar with the white man’s amusements were admitted. The others could watch. Celanire and Thomas were whispering cheek to cheek on a sofa. Thomas’s hand was impatiently creeping up the oblate’s thighs. Panic-stricken once again, Hakim dashed outside and ran home as fast as he could.
Karamanlis refused to believe a word. A bordello? And what next? Just a few embraces and kisses stolen from girls who were generally easygoing. You can think what you like about Thomas de Brabant, the colony knew he was the very model of virtue. As for Celanire, she was merely an oblate. Not a nun. She was entitled to use makeup and rig herself out as she thought fit. In the end Karamanlis became angry, forbidding Hakim to insult the woman he loved.
