by Hugo Wilcken
He stayed up on deck as the boat docked. A few passengers left the boat at Georgetown; a few more disembarked to lunch in town. Manne wasn’t hungry; he contented himself with a stroll up and down the quay, watching the dockers as they loaded up goods for Cayenne. A kaleidoscopic crowd bustled about by the boat: British sailors in their crisp whites; black policemen in bobby’s helmets; Chinese men peddling food; Indians shifting implausibly huge sacks; Creole women in their vivid headdresses.
As he was about to reboard, Manne noticed a tall British officer striding towards the boat from one of the dockside buildings, trailing a couple of armed customs officials and a dozen pitifully dressed white men. The captain rushed down the gangplank to remonstrate. ‘No no no,’ Manne could hear him bellowing, ‘I don’t have handcuffs, don’t have bars, I’ve nowhere to put them, I can’t take them!’
The captain was barring the way. Eventually the British officer conferred with one of the customs men, who was sent off on an errand. Another of the customs officials gave an order and the men in rags sat down on the ground by the boat. No one else on the quay seemed to pay any attention to them. Manne dawdled by, watching them sprawled over the paving stones as if squashed to the ground by the force of the sun. Every now and then, one of them would throw an impotent glance in the direction of the boat. But most seemed as uninterested in their fate as the people who hurried along the docks. One man held his head between his knees; the others gazed about vacantly, like zoo animals.
What struck Manne most forcibly was how stunted they were – almost as short as the pygmies he’d encountered once, years before, on an expedition to the Congo. Half were without shoes and their feet were a mess of bites, wounds, bruises the colour of bad meat. All were bearded, except a couple who were too young for it. And they all shared the same starved stare, the bowed shoulders, the cow-like docility.
Manne sidled up to one of them. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Saint-Laurent.’
‘What happened?’
The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Stole a boat. But it washed ashore.’
‘What’ll happen to you?’
Silence, another shrug of indifference. The customs officer was back now with a podgy little man in a cravat, obviously French. The consul, Manne supposed. He and the captain clearly knew each other, but they didn’t shake hands.
‘Georgetown prison doesn’t want them,’ the podgy man was saying. ‘What d’you expect me to do? Adopt them?’
The captain shook his head. ‘I don’t have anywhere to put them.’
‘Put ’em in the hold with the cargo! Listen, if you won’t take ’em, I’ll wire Cayenne. They’ll wire back the order before you leave. Then you’ll have to take them. Don’t force me to waste my time.’
‘All right,’ said the captain with an angry wave of the hand. ‘You’d better get me some handcuffs or leg irons. I’m not having them free to roam about the ship.’
A short while later the men were marched on board. Just behind them, Manne noticed the sailor and the girl walking together up the gangplank, hand in hand, the same ones he’d seen earlier on deck. They were relaxed and easy with each other, as though something had been resolved. Pointing ahead to the men in rags with her other hand, the girl seemed momentarily anguished. ‘What if they seize the ship or something?’
The sailor laughed. ‘Look at the buggers. Couldn’t kick a dog, let alone seize a ship. Better get used to ’em anyway, where you’re heading.’
Another day and night at sea, shadowing the coast. Then Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, under a ferocious morning sun – it was where Manne was disembarking. No point in going on to Cayenne with the other passengers, since there was no road from Cayenne to Saint-Laurent. Easier to get off here, and make his way down to the border town of Albina, a boat ride away from the penitentiary.
A black porter rushed up to him as he stepped off the gangplank, but Manne waved him away. His two smallish suitcases were easy enough to carry – all they contained were a few changes of clothes, some books, cash, bank orders, letters, papers. Any other possessions had long ago been sold off, or abandoned in Europe. And over the last few years, he’d continued to pare down his belongings, at first unconsciously but later deliberately. Because in the end, it was surprising what little one needed to keep going. Manne cleared customs and made his way to the ticketing office. A boat would be leaving in two hours down the Commewijne River for Moengo, the ticket man said. From there, he could get a lift to Albina.
Barely past breakfast time, but Manne was already slick and sticky from the heat, in need of a wash. No point in checking into a hotel, though, with just a couple of hours to spare. Instead he strolled along the streets near the docks. The feeling was of a town that had yet to gel into any particular style. Its wooden buildings looked vaguely Scandinavian. The rice-laden barges paddled by rows of Malay men made one think of the Far East. Whatever it was, it felt foreign, after the Gallic claustrophobia of the boat. Manne ducked into a barber shop, hidden among a bazaar of little storefronts. The barber quickly lathered him up and started to shave.
‘Just got in?’
‘That’s right.’
‘From Guadeloupe?’
‘On that boat, yes. I got on at Port-of-Spain.’
‘So what’s your business here?’
‘Passing through.’
‘Where are you heading?’
‘Moengo. Then down to the Maroni.’
‘You don’t want to go down there. Terrible country.’
‘Why?’
‘Full of fever. If the fever doesn’t get you, the bandits will. Crawling with escaped convicts. Bad country.’
They were talking in French, but then the barber broke off to jabber something in Creole to a young boy loitering outside. Tattered Dutch and English magazines lay on a table by Manne’s chair. The barber was one of those types Manne had come across so often in the colonies – of European origin, fluent in four or five languages, and yet impossible to tell where he was really from, if anywhere.
‘No, what you want to do is head up to the highlands,’ the barber continued. ‘It’s healthier. More gold up there. And it’s a damn sight easier to get at than on the Maroni.’
‘Really?’
The barber stopped shaving for a moment. ‘Look, if you’re interested, I know someone you should talk to. He’s got a mining concession on a river up in the highlands. You never know, he might sell it to you. I hear there are giant nuggets up that way. Men shipping gold by the kilo.’
‘If that’s true, why aren’t you up there?’
‘I’m a barber,’ the man mumbled. ‘Not a prospector.’
He carried on shaving in silence. Always the same in prospecting country, with even the barbers trying to sell you worthless concessions.
‘Ever see any of those escaped convicts you were talking about?’ asked Manne after a pause.
‘Seen plenty of them,’ the barber replied, without much interest. ‘Bloody thieves and murderers, the lot of them.’
‘Ever been down that way?’
The barber shook his head. ‘I told you. It’s no good down there. A graveyard.’
Enough time for coffee, then a stroll back to the docks to board the next boat. A very different affair from the one he’d arrived on, where most of the passengers had been French or French Creole, and a Gallic decorum had prevailed. On this boat, people were herded on like cattle, and no single nationality dominated. There were American engineers, Dutch soldiers, Javanese labourers, Chinese traders, miners and prospectors, chancers of every sort.
Minutes out of Paramaribo, and they were in thick jungle. A sluggish breeze made the heat bearable, and for a while Manne paced the upper deck to get some air. Gradually, the ever-twisting river narrowed until there was hardly room for the boat to get through. Nonetheless, it steamed on at a reckless pace. The water was deep right to the banks, and bushes reached metres out over the river, acting like fenders to stop the boat from running ag
round. Native dugouts scurried out of the way as the boat approached. Kilometre upon kilometre of the same chaos of green, with nothing to distinguish one part from any other – the random monotony of the jungle that Manne knew so well. Occasionally a colourful swarm of parrots would rise up from the trees and swoop down on the boat, like the reconnaissance aeroplanes Manne remembered from the war.
Most of the passengers were bunched up at the front of the boat, enjoying the cooling wind. In search of some solitude, Manne made his way to a small lower deck at the stern, abandoned because some of the engine smoke blew onto it. He managed to find a protected corner, though, and sat down on a bench by the rails. He was going to read his book, and opened one of his bags to get it out, but then changed his mind. He found himself rifling through a folder of papers slipped down one side of the case. His passport and birth certificate, a few envelopes, some other documents with his name on them.
One by one, he dropped the papers over the side of the boat, shocked and thrilled by his own action. The papers turned in the wind and swirled about in the wake like darting birds. He’d boarded the French boat as Manne, which was dangerous enough, but he couldn’t risk entering French territory under his own identity. At some expense he’d acquired another passport from a trafficker in Caracas, just a few weeks before. It bore his photograph, and the name of Paul Hartfeld, born in Brussels. Had such a person ever existed? He did now, in any case. There’d been a few weeks when Hartfeld and Manne had shared the same body, but Manne was gone now. He felt a pang of regret or emptiness, but it passed quickly enough. He was Paul Hartfeld. Almost identical to Manne, and yet in some as yet indefinable way quite different.
Dusk. The boat turned a final bend to reveal a floodlit industrial plant, with AMERICAN ALUMINUM CO., MOENGO painted in colossal letters along its side. A startling sight, deep in the heart of the jungle. Manne let the other passengers disembark first, then made his way down the gangplank and wandered the length of the single street. A company town – not much here but the monstrous plant, some worker accommodation, a general store, a bar. No hotel, but after asking around Manne was offered a government room above the police station for a few florins. Just enough space for a bed and mosquito net, with a faded picture of the Dutch queen on the wall.
At the bar he found a Chinaman heading for Albina first thing next morning. A plate of stew and a couple of beers later, Manne began to feel his head spinning: sheer exhaustion probably, combined with the vile chemical fumes the plant belched out. He managed to make it back to his room and collapsed on his bed. Sleep came instantly, once more troubled by dreams of Edouard, none of which he could remember in the morning.
A loud banging woke him up: five o’clock, still dark, the Chinese trader at his door ready to leave. Minutes later, he found himself crashing along in a battered old Ford with no suspension. The road itself was nothing more than a dirt trail in the jungle, so narrow at points that branches swept in through the open sides of the car. The back heaved with bags of rice and flour, and it seemed the only way to keep the car going was to rattle on at top speed and rely on momentum.
Even if the Chinaman had been a talkative type, the engine noise precluded all conversation. But halfway along they stopped for bread and water, and Manne felt compelled to fill the silence: ‘You live in Albina?’
The Chinaman shook his head. ‘Delivery.’ He jabbed his thumb in the direction of the sacks in the back.
‘What’s it like, Albina? Nice place?’
He shook his head again. ‘Nothing to do there. So quiet, people must go to Saint-Laurent for fun!’ He broke out in raucous laughter as if he’d just cracked the most hilarious joke.
On along the trail at breakneck speed, stopping one more time to fill the hissing radiator with water. A couple of hours later the road suddenly widened, and Albina and the river came into view. The car pulled up alongside a general store; Manne collected his bags from the back. Albina seemed not much more than a row of tidy whitewashed houses in the colonial style. The river, on the other hand, was a vast expanse, a good couple of kilometres across. It was a relief and also a little overwhelming to be able to see so far, after the claustrophobia of the jungle. The sunlight bounced off the water’s rippling surface, dazzling him.
‘Where you go? You want a room?’ asked the Chinaman.
Manne shook his head, pointed out across the river. He’d been going to spend the night in Albina, but what was the point?
‘Saint-Laurent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go to the water. Boni man will take you across. You give one florin. One florin only!’
II
Customs House: a corpulent official with a florid moustache asked for his papers, and Manne handed over the fake passport. Hartfeld, he reminded himself. You’re Paul Hartfeld now.
‘How long are you staying?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You have permission to stay?’
‘Here’s the visa.’
The official looked it over, shook his head. ‘This is for Cayenne. Not for the penal territories. You need permission from the governor’s office to stay more than twenty-four hours.’
‘I did forward a letter of introduction to the governor from Caracas. There’s a copy of it here.’
He proffered the letter he’d had forged, with its fancy letterhead for a non-existent institute of tropical botany in Belgium.
‘I’ll check with the governor’s office,’ said the official. ‘You’ll have to report back tomorrow. Where are you staying?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Well, there’s only one place to stay here.’
Manne stumbled back out into the bleached streetscape. He found himself panting a little – the heat was quite different from on the coast, where a constant breeze made it tolerable. Here, the air was so heavy that it felt at times like a solid mass weighing down on you.
Opposite the Customs House, Manne noticed the statue of a man staring out over the river, with two black men cowering at his feet. He walked up to the statue to read the little plaque: ‘Victor Schoelcher, liberator of slaves’. Then he wandered further up the main boulevard, past a string of well-kept administrative buildings and an attractive-looking hospital with wide verandas. For a tropical town, everything seemed well scrubbed and impeccably clean.
Here and there, men with wide straw hats and striped uniforms were gently pushing a broom, or leaning down to prise a weed from a crack in the pavement. In the intensity of the noonday heat, they moved with an exacting slowness, as if time itself had wound down to a painful crawl. They seemed totally unsupervised. A long wall, then a gigantic arched gateway came into view, marked CAMP DE LA TRANSPORTATION. The gates were open. Convicts wandered in and out, with no apparent purpose.
A Creole woman walked past Manne, a loaf of bread under her arm. He was in a tiny commercial district now, a block long. There was a boulangerie to his left, a bank and a post office too – the letter box the same shape and colour as in France. Beyond the shops, a neatly laid-out residential quarter stretched out, with its squat bungalows, tidy gardens, ugly little church. It was different enough from anywhere else he’d been in South America. None of the overripe, baroque fantasy favoured by the Spanish and Portuguese colonists. No, this was more like the drab suburb of a provincial town in some nondescript corner of Picardy.
Soon after, the boulevard crumbled into a dirt path, the bungalows giving way to little lean-tos and shelters made from corrugated iron. Just like any shanty town, on the outskirts of any city. A few white men in rags were slumped in front of their makeshift dwellings, playing cards or simply staring into space. Libérés, no doubt – men who’d finished their sentence but weren’t permitted to return to France. Then beyond the shanty town, nothing. The dirt path petered out into a little trail that pierced the darkness of the forest. Saint-Laurent was small, smaller than Manne had imagined it. You could see it all in twenty minutes.
In the dead of the afternoon, a bel
l was tolling, its single note ringing on and on. Manne wandered back along the boulevard in search of the town’s only hotel. The temptation to stop and stare at the bagnards as he passed was too strong to resist. Their slow, silent movements lent them a certain gravity, as if they were the apostles of a new religion. Marked, wrinkled faces stared blankly back at him like a distorting mirror. Manne towered above most of them. Impossible to imagine Edouard among these broken remnants of an underclass. Not for the first time, he wondered whether Edouard’s letter wasn’t some kind of hollow, eccentric joke. It was hot, so hot he had to stop from time to time to get his breath. The breeze itself felt as if it were on fire.
Au Petit Coin de Paris: he found it on the rue Voltaire, just behind the commercial block, in front of a sort of wasteland. A small café-bar, with a few rooms to rent at the back. A mulatto woman stood behind the bar, some kids played outside in the dirt. Manne sat down and ordered a coffee, then called over one of the kids and gave him a few coins to collect his bags from the Customs House. He tasted the coffee and inwardly grimaced: in a continent where they grew so much of the stuff, how could it be so awful? On the bar top lay a few yellowing magazines. He flicked through a months-old copy of La Vie Parisienne. Theatre reviews, society women, photos of a ball at the Hôtel de Crillon … He had a memory of dining there with a lover once, before the war. Such a long time ago. Paris seemed unreal. It was this café, this simulacrum of a town, that was the real truth of life.
He got out his journal and started to write:
The same streets, the same hotel rooms. You travel a thousand kilometres, only to find the same face in the mirror. I don’t feel hopeful about what I have come to do. I’m not depressed. But I feel no drive, no urge to swing into action. Perhaps it’s the heat.
He closed the journal again. That was all that would come these days, a phrase here, a phrase there. Before, he was capable of writing pages and pages at a sitting. That too, in any case, had been pared down to the bare minimum.
