Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

by Maryse Conde

  From that day on, it was nothing but quarrels and insults.

  Within a few days, relations between Hakim and Karamanlis had grown so bitter that one afternoon, coming home from school, Hakim found his belongings thrown out under the rain. He gathered them up under the amused look of the houseboy and the neighbors. Where would he go now? The miserable wages of a schoolteacher were not enough to pay for lodgings. After hesitating, he set off for his only refuge: Koffi Ndizi’s compound.

  The compound was in a state of pandemonium.

  Koffi Ndizi had been in a meeting since morning with the queen mother and the counsel of elders. The three royal concubines had not put up with their thrashing by a cat-o’-nine-tails. Refusing to be treated for their wounds, they had fled, once again leaving behind them their young infants. They had not gone back to their families, as abused women usually do. Where in fact had they gone? To the Home for Half-Castes, where the director immediately recruited them. For it was rumored around, in a confused sort of way like all rumors, that the Home was a paradise for women. Up there, it seemed, you didn’t wait for happiness in vain. You grabbed armfuls of it. No more smoke from the green wood stinging your eyes! No more fetching water! No more foutou to pound! Hakim knew the way they treated women in Koffi Ndizi’s compound. Beasts of burden and fodder for pleasure! Only the princesses had the right to remain independent, to choose their husbands and replace them if they were so inclined. So in a way he could understand their escape. Yet he was afraid of what lay in store for the fugitives up at the Home if his intuition were right.

  Since he was unable to approach the king, he walked over to Kwame Aniedo’s hut. The crown prince was amusing himself with a slave girl, but, good prince that he was, he interrupted his lovemaking and told Hakim he could sleep as many nights as he wanted in his entrance hall.

  Kwame Aniedo was not only a handsome specimen. At school he ranked among the most gifted children, and Hakim had tried to persuade his father that he would have no difficulty mastering the secrets of the white man. To no end! The king wouldn’t hear of it. School, he believed, was a waste of time. He had removed his son at the age of thirteen so as to keep his prestige as crown prince intact. As a result, for three years Kwame Aniedo had been doing absolutely nothing except eat to his heart’s content, yawn at his musicians playing, and terrorize the girls who refused to go to bed with him. He hated the French who had humiliated his father and lent a sympathetic ear to Hakim’s anticolonialist diatribes, without realizing that the latter was only interested in keeping him company while Kwame slipped out of his clothes and dived naked into the lagoon.

  In the early evening, the usual crowd of brothers and cousins, idle royal princes, streamed into Kwame Aniedo’s hut. The evening was spent downing vast quantities of palm wine while palavering over the fate of the royal concubines. The general opinion was that they should be brought back by force and inflicted a punishment which would serve as an example. The cat-o’-nine-tails was not enough. Rather a few days locked up without food or water. It was late when Hakim finally fell asleep and he was still snoring when a messenger came to wake him: Koffi Ndizi was asking for him. His earthenware pipe wedged between his teeth, the king was pacing up and down. He had not slept a wink all night and had been in constant consultation with the queen mother and the elders. They had finally come to a decision. Since the wretched oblate was the protégée of the French, they had to tread lightly. Hakim would write a polite letter on behalf of the king begging her to return the three concubines. He would explain they belonged to the royal family. To keep them would be a serious breach of tradition, an offense. Hakim therefore went back to look for some paper and a pen and wrote down everything they had asked of him.

  After two weeks it was obvious that Celanire couldn’t care less about the letter Koffi Ndizi had sent her. This was another pretext for deliberation and consultation. The queen mother was outraged. The elders lost their saliva. Some of them called for a punitive raid on the Home, just like in the good old days. But how would they go about it? Nobody knew. As for the fetish priests, they advised on caution as they could not understand who this oblate was. In order to clarify matters, shouldn’t they get her to undergo a trial by ordeal? If she passed the test and came out unscathed, they would know she was a normal person with nothing on her conscience. Okay, but how could they approach her?

  Finally, Koffi Ndizi entrusted Hakim with a mission that was to be a last resort. This time he would go in person to the Home and plead on behalf of the kingdom. Hakim obeyed, with heavy heart.

  When he arrived at the Home, Celanire was teaching in her classroom. Madame Desrussie showed him into an office on the second floor. The view was magical. Beneath the balcony the garden stretched away like a priceless carpet embellished with freshly planted Madagascar periwinkles, coral hibiscus, and oleander already in full bloom. The long rainy season was drawing to a close. The sky was losing its leaden color. If the place was in fact a bordello, it hid it well under its aspect of a Garden of Eden. When Celanire appeared, Hakim did not recognize her. She was wearing a dress of tiny blue-and-yellow squares, buttoned from top to bottom, with a buttercup-yellow neckerchief. Her hair had been braided into two plaits. Without makeup she looked eighteen at the most. She was no longer the sensual vamp, but poetically poignant. While they drank mint tea, she talked of her passion for Africa. In her opinion there was only one dark side to the beauty of its civilization: the treatment of women. Was he aware that the Africans mutilated the female genitals? They excised the clitoris and the labia. Then they sewed up the folds, leaving a narrow passage for the urine and the menstrual blood. Hakim’s imagination had seldom ventured into such places. Ill at ease, he stammered that this practice was the equivalent of male circumcision. But it was an intolerable aggression, she exclaimed indignantly, perpetrated against women in order to control their sexuality. Then she changed the subject and began to describe the great solitude of her life. She had never known her true parents and was nothing but a foster child. Oh, she had nothing against her foster parents, especially her papa. But it was tough not knowing the sperm that fathered her or the womb that carried her. At Adjame-Santey, she felt an outsider. Thomas de Brabant possessed her body but not her heart. Stunned by her candor, Hakim was rendered speechless. She then turned to interrogate him, and he heard himself confiding and revealing all his childhood troubles. He too felt an outsider in Adjame-Santey. Moreover, he had always felt an outsider in Africa. In short, one hour later, furious with himself, he was back on the path taking him home. Not only had he not breathed a word about the mission Koffi Ndizi had entrusted him with, but he had promised Celanire he would pay her many more visits.

  Had she bewitched him?

  3

  The rains had let up now for two weeks. The hedges of croton bordering the houses of the Europeans could finally lift their heads. The clumps of guinea grass sprouted green along the embankments. Behind the fences of secco the animals frolicked for joy. Only Koffi Ndizi’s compound remained unaffected by this springlike revival. One night Tanella, a concubine of Mawourou, the king’s uncle on his mother’s side, had stuck a knife in his heart while he was asleep. Once the deed was done, she had fled.

  Two years earlier Tanella had been one of the gifts, together with the fowl, dried fish, and richly woven wrappers, the village of Attonblan had offered Koffi Ndizi. She had never been much to his liking, and he had left her to Kwame Aniedo, who for a time had used her for his pleasure. One day, while she was pounding plantains in one of the courtyards, Mawourou had caught sight of her fifteen-year-old breasts. Mawourou had fathered a dozen sons, already fathers to sons themselves; but he was still so troubled by the desires of the flesh that he employed an army of fetish priests to concoct his aphrodisiacs. Tanella’s crime was only discovered the next morning when the blood that had trickled out under the doors of Mawourou’s hut coagulated into a red crust in the very middle of the courtyard. Murder was so rare an occurrence in the region that people
first attributed the gaping hole in the old man’s heart to a fit of anger by the spirits. Then the truth became obvious. The evil deed had been caused by a human hand. Some women who had got up early recalled having seen Tanella running away in blood-soaked clothes and remembered she had complained of Mawourou on many occasions. His breath was fetid. He had trouble getting a hard-on; he beat her. They searched for her throughout the compound, in the vicinity of the lagoon, and even as far as the forest. A few men ran along the road to the village of Attonblan but came back empty-handed. Nobody had seen Tanella. At day’s end the rumor spread that she had found refuge at the Home for Half-Castes. So the widows, the children, and the friends of Mawourou, all those who had known him while he was alive and all those who had nothing better to do, assembled into a crowd and marched off to fetch her back from the Home.

  The procession slowly wound its way through Adjame-Santey, where the population, struck with horror, commented on the terrible turn of events. Karamanlis watched from his store as he saw Hakim and his pupils bringing up the rear of the cortege. He eyed him scornfully. So there he was a “liberated” young man taking the side of a lascivious old man, abuser of young girls, who after all had only reaped what he sowed. On reaching the Palace of Justice (a fine name for a clay hut), the procession swelled with all the idle bystanders and onlookers who happened to be around. On the outskirts of Adjame-Santey the crowd quickened its pace without really knowing why, perhaps because night was approaching. The sky was growing dark. Soon the spirits would be on the prowl. In fact, much of the crowd did not really want Tanella to be put to death, the punishment for such a crime. They were marching with the others to demonstrate quite simply that it was time, high time, the French and their henchmen, governors, priests and oblates, left them to their customs and went home. Even the women who, deep in their hearts, were sympathetic toward Tanella, understandably tired of surrendering her youth night after night to the fantasies of an old man, were convinced that a shadowy past in its death throes was preferable to the future these foreigners had in store for them. When the crowd came in sight of the Home, they were surprised to find rows of militia from a neighboring camp pointing their guns at them. Why? The crowd hesitated and began to retreat in disorder. The fearful fled, predicting disaster. The more courageous began to throw rocks and stood their ground. With hackles up, the head of the militia barked a number of syllables that nobody could understand. He barked again. Then his men obeyed. And opened fire.

  After the shots rang out, three bodies lay on the ground, including two of Hakim’s pupils, the ten-year-olds Senanou and Dabla. Plus a dozen wounded.

  Thomas de Brabant reread the official telegram he had just received.

  On learning of the grave events at Adjame-Santey, the indiscriminate use of force, the high number of casualties, Governor Alix Pol-Roger was cutting short his mission to the north and returning home as quickly as possible. Having offered refuge to a murderer, the oblate Celanire Pinceau, who was the cause of the troubles, must appear before him immediately. The tone of the telegram left no doubt in his mind. Celanire’s appointment as director of the Home would not be ratified. As for Thomas, he risked a reprimand or even a demotion. The hypocrisy of these senior colonial officials made him sick. Hundreds of “voluntary workers” were dying of hunger and ill treatment along the railroad. Nobody breathed a word about them, whereas the three wretched corpses of Adjame-Santey would be the talk of all French West Africa. In fact, the administration was mainly concerned about the two school pupils, Senanou and Dabla. As luck would have it, they were the sons of Betti Bouah, one of the richest merchants of the region, of royal blood, related to Koffi Ndizi, but who had the intelligence to be sympathetic to the French. It was now feared he would switch sides. A paltry excuse! What rules was Thomas expected to obey? Perhaps they would have preferred he let the fanatics sack the Home, stone Tanella to death, and beat Celanire and her assistants black and blue. That sort of tragedy was exactly what his firmness had avoided that evening, and law and order had been restored. Celanire had no intention of shielding Tanella from justice. She only meant to protect her from her compatriots. After having kept her overnight at the Home and calmed her down as best she could, she herself had handed her over to the askaris who had taken her to the jail at Grand-Bassam. From there she was to leave on the first ship for Dakar and appear before the supreme court that met twice a year. Thomas’s legitimate anger at his superiors was mingled with an insidious terror of their discovering something else, too shameful to mention. He no longer understood what madness had let him be convinced by Celanire and made him approve of her plans. It was as if his mistress had bewitched him. At her side, he was powerless and could no longer distinguish right from wrong. It was a fact they only entertained high-ranking officials at the Home. No subalterns, secretaries, or pencil pushers! Even so, they were at the mercy of a tongue loosened by too much drink.

  Incapable of staying still, he donned his pith helmet and mounted his bicycle, since the track was now passable again. He wisely made a detour to avoid the house where the wake for Senanou and Dabla was being held. The place had become a rallying point for fanatics making anti-French remarks where, he had been told, Hakim was in his element.

  At the end of the year, Adjame-Santey was to be renamed Bingerville at an official ceremony in honor of the colony’s first governor. The administrative buildings, however, were far from finished. The governor’s palace had scarcely poked its head out from the building site that had once been the cemetery. As Thomas rode around the mission, he saw a cortege approaching. Flanked by the remainder of his guards, sheltering under an umbrella, preceded by his gold-cane bearer, King Koffi Ndizi, tripping on his sandals, was going to pay his final respects to his cousin’s children. The procession took up the entire width of the path, for Koffi Ndizi was surrounded by a good dozen sycophants, including the inevitable Hakim. In a flash, Thomas summed up the situation. Either he kept pedaling straight ahead and rode right into the oncoming procession, knocking over two or three, or else he got off his bicycle and stood like a country yokel in the guinea grass on the embankment. Despite his arrogance, he did not think twice. Adjame-Santey had been through enough confrontations in such a short time. He dismounted. The king walked by without turning his head in his direction, joining both hands level with his mouth in an African greeting, while the looks of his entourage cut him like flint stones. He even thought he heard snickers of laughter.

  At present the Home was looking so good it would have been the pride of Dakar. Under the late Desrussie, an epidemic of yaws would follow an epidemic of yellow fever. It was better not to count the number of dead. Once they had buried thirty in a single month. Under Celanire’s radiating care the children glowed with health and cleanliness. A group of small children under the charge of two assistants was sitting in a circle on the lawn singing “Frère Jacques” in their delightful little voices. Some of the older boys were marching off in manly fashion to the fields, hoe in hand. The bamboo grove, the young palm trees, and the budding orchard were another treat for the eyes. Celanire had taken advantage of the dry season to have the facade repainted in a very pale eggshell tint edged with dark red. Her choice of unusual colors was evidence of her exquisite taste, which made her so precious to Thomas. It was obvious the meager allowance attributed to running the Home couldn’t possibly have been enough to cover all these improvements, and going over the colony’s accounts with a fine-toothed comb would have turned up quite a few surprises.

  Celanire was resting in a boudoir, draped in a kimono of black silk, a color she seemed to like, embroidered with red roses and buttercups. If it hadn’t been for her wide, somewhat triangular nose and her very full lips, she could have been mistaken for an Indian from the French trading posts of Pondicherry, Kana Kal, and Manahe. Thomas smothered her with kisses, then got control of himself and pulled the telegram out of his pocket. Celanire shrugged her shoulders and vaguely asked a few questions. Where exactly was Governor P
ol-Roger? Thomas explained he was in Felkessekaha among the Niarafolo Senufo natives. As if this was of no interest to her, she changed the subject. She was thinking of going to the wake for Senanou and Dabla as a way of expressing her condolences to the family. What did he think of the idea? Thomas uttered a shrill cry: Was she out of her mind? The Africans hated her. She would be stoned to death.

  In fact hostilities had been declared for some time now between Celanire and the Africans. Celanire had proclaimed loud and clear she had no intention of letting the girls in her care be sexually mutilated. Going by what she said, the very fact that the mothers let their offspring be placed in the Home for Half-Castes by their French papas meant they renounced de facto all their rights, and the children became the sole responsibility of the French administration. Obviously, such quibbling had not made the slightest impression. While the innocent six-year-old Marie-Angélique was spending the weekend with her family, they had grabbed the opportunity to put her under the excision knife. She had almost died from a hemorrhage. In a fit of anger, Celanire forbade her boarders to leave the Home from that moment on and only allowed family visits once every three months. Although some families were not bothered by these rules, others, as you can imagine, raised a hue and cry. Half-caste or not, some mothers were fond of their little darlings and accused Celanire of sequestering them. They camped outside the Home in tears. The courts were bombarded with complaints, and Thomas had great trouble getting the fact accepted that his mistress was within her rights.

  Thomas had already noticed that Celanire was a stubborn woman who did just what she liked. Without paying the slightest heed to his objections, she drew him close to her.