by Hugo Wilcken
‘What are you going to do now?’ she said flatly. The words sounded shockingly loud. ‘Are you going to force yourself on me?’
‘Of course not.’
He’d been holding his breath; he hadn’t even noticed. The tension had broken, and the woman was bending down now, picking up her brassiere. Abruptly he turned around, walked out the door. He found himself striding back along the path, as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run. He stumbled over a root and almost lost his balance. He stopped for a few seconds, tried to calm his shaking with deep breaths. A knot in a tree trunk caught his attention: it looked like an eye, staring out at him, following him as he moved on again. Along the path, the bleached tropical light punctured the canopy randomly, but then broke over him as he came out into the garden. Once again, he found himself walking across the expanse of dead turf.
He’d got halfway across the garden when he noticed Guépard at the back door of the house. Manne slowed down, resisted the temptation to look behind to see if the commandant’s wife was following him. Guépard was wearing an apron, and was sitting on the doorstep. As Manne got closer, he saw that the boy was polishing shoes. He continued to take deep breaths in an effort to control himself. At the door, he got out his packet of cigarettes: the tobacco might calm him. He offered the packet to Guépard. ‘Cigarette?’
The boy looked up nervously. ‘Non, m’sieur, merci, m’sieur.’
Why must the boy be so damned tense around him? Manne lit his cigarette, drew in the smoke; he could feel the nicotine wash through his body like a barbiturate.
‘Any luck yet?’
The boy looked at him in surprise. ‘I don’t understand, m’sieur.’
‘You do remember what I asked you to do?’
‘Oui, m’sieur. I will do it, m’sieur. I will do it. You trust me, m’sieur.’
‘I trust you.’
But of course the boy hadn’t had the time to make enquiries yet. That interview with him in his bedroom had only been an hour or two ago. It felt like days. The sense of time was escaping him: things that happened a decade before could be so clear, things of only minutes ago a distant memory.
‘How are you settling in here, Guépard?’
Again the boy looked up in astonishment. ‘E-e-everything very good, m’sieur. Thank you, m’sieur.’
Yes, the boy had a slight stutter – he hadn’t noticed that before. Manne stood there smoking his cigarette as the boy continued polishing shoes, horribly self-consciously, no doubt wishing Manne would go away.
‘How would you like to stay here for a while?’
‘I d-don’t understand, m’sieur.’
‘I noticed you tending the kitchen garden this morning. Do you like gardening?’
‘Y-y-yes, m’sieur. I used to look after my mother’s vegetable patch, m’sieur.’
‘What if I could get you a post here? A domestic post? How would you feel about that, Guépard? I could ask the commandant on your behalf.’
The boy looked bewildered. ‘Oui, m’sieur. Whatever you think, m’sieur.’
‘All right then, Guépard. I’ll see what I can manage.’
Upstairs in his room, Manne took his clothes off, filled the basin and put his head in the water. Afterwards, he lay down on his bed, but quickly got up again. Finally, he pushed his desk chair over to the window. For an hour, he sat staring out at the lawn – a rusty brown expanse, pregnant with loss. He’d tell the commandant to get a tougher, better-adapted turf variety shipped from Belém. He kept staring out, watching to see if the woman would come back from the hut, but she didn’t. If she returned, if he heard her on the stairs, he’d go and see her, tell her that he’d help her leave, apologise for his behaviour, blame it on the confusion of fever. Yes, he could certainly feel himself on the cusp of fever – the shaking, the sweating, the hallucinatory memories. But he was at that stage where you could still beat it, where if you really concentrated, you could stop it coming on through force of will alone.
A gold chain and crucifix had dangled between the woman’s breasts. Had he actually seen that, or was it his imagination? It was as if he’d dozed off by the window, dreamt that he’d got up and walked to the hut, and then woken up here again in his chair. If she decided to tell her husband what had happened, then it’d be better if Manne were to leave immediately. Melt away into the forest. If only he had the confidence that he could still do it, the way the climate got to him now. Under the sun, after the endless kilometres, he could feel the fragmentation, the pieces chipping off as if from an old statue. His journal hadn’t lied; it told the story well enough. It sat there accusingly, where he’d left it on the desk. What if he destroyed it now, burnt it? The cities he’d visited, the languages he’d spoken, the people he’d met, the plant collectors, the art teacher in Rio, the mistress in Caracas … his journal was the sole, unifying record. The rest was nothing but the falsehoods of memory.
He was no one: a ragbag of tics and tricks, echoes and clichés. A vague homesickness invaded him – but for somewhere he’d never been. Missing people he’d never known, and longing for lovers never touched.
V
‘Drink, Hartfeld?’
‘I’m afraid lunchtime drinking doesn’t agree with me in this climate.’
The commandant had poured himself a large rum. Once again, there were place settings for three at the table, although Manne hadn’t seen the woman return from the hut. He’d almost begged off lunch himself, but the thought of the commandant and his wife alone at table changed his mind. He wanted to say something to her before she spoke to her husband.
‘Thought you might like to come along with me this afternoon, take a look at one of the construction sites. Might interest you. I’d appreciate your thoughts as well.’
‘Kind of you to offer – yes, I’d like that very much.’
Why did one tend to automatically accept unexpected invitations? Manne took a forkful of the grey stew he’d been served, which turned out to be edible enough. The butler hadn’t waited for the woman to arrive, and as the commandant prattled on, Manne mused on this. Perhaps she sometimes came down to lunch, and sometimes didn’t, and the butler could never be sure which.
A pause in the monologue: the commandant seemed to expect Manne to say something now, show interest.
‘So how many convicts do you have here at the camp in all?’
‘Oh, I think it’s about three hundred.’
‘And what are they here for, mostly? I hope you don’t mind my asking.’
‘No no. Of course not.’ Nonetheless, the commandant looked uncomfortable. ‘Murder, I’d say. Half of them at least. Maybe more.’
‘Really? That many?’ It did actually interest Manne. The butler cleared the plates off the table, then disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Your man, for example. What brought him here?’
‘Charles?’ The commandant lowered his voice. ‘That was murder. Killed his wife, I believe.’
‘I see. And you’re not worried about his being around your own wife?’
‘No, I’m not, bu t…’ he frowned. ‘It’s difficult to explain, but let me try. There are career criminals … and there are the violent types … but they get sent to the Islands, or they stay in the camp barracks. For domestic service, we use a different type. Often convicts who’ve committed just the one murder, in the heat of the moment. A violent row with an unfaithful wife. That sort of thing. They’re not going to do it again. These criminals have one crime in them, that defines them. I’m not explaining myself very well …’
‘No, I think I understand what you mean.’
‘Good, good.’ The commandant looked embarrassed, as if he’d let slip something private. ‘Now, if you’ve finished, why don’t we have some coffee in my study and I can show you where we’re heading this afternoon.’
The two of them set out through the forest, up the path towards the camp. Neither spoke much. There was something about the forest and its random noises that suppressed general convers
ation, Manne had found during his years of wandering. At one point, out of habit, Manne stopped and looked up to the canopy.
‘What is it?’
Manne pointed. ‘See up there? That clump of purple flowers? An unusual orchid species. Not exactly rare, but not common either.’
The commandant squinted up. ‘Ah yes, I see it.’ He stood stroking his chin. ‘Are there a lot of orchids about in the forest?’
‘I should think there are, around here.’
‘Could they be collected or cultivated? Would it be easy?’
‘They could be collected. The commoner varieties can be cultivated, yes. You have to know what you’re doing, though.’
‘Interesting … I actually had some orchids shipped in from Florida. For an orchid house I had built in the garden. But they all died.’
‘Most of them would, normally. You’d be better off harvesting them from the forest. Take a look in the botanical gardens next time you’re in Saint-Laurent. There’s some sort of fertilising project there.’
They moved on. Manne was thinking about orchids again. He was remembering his great-uncle’s house in Chiswick, with its greenhouse that took up most of the garden, and the reflections of the orchids that would bounce off the glass walls. The morgue-like stillness of everything inside was what had most impressed. Row upon row of little pots, each carefully numbered and labelled. He could see his great-uncle toiling away with his orchids, potting them, repotting them, feeding them, enveloping them in a fine water mist, lavishing his love on them, day in, day out, always the same, year after year. He’d been an enigma to Manne as a child. But now Manne thought he understood his great-uncle well enough. It was an existence that had been smoothed, polished and finished until it was like a perfectly round, shiny pebble, with no irregularities, a life that admitted no way in and no way out.
Manne’s great-uncle had rarely left his own house and grounds, had probably never been abroad. But his library had been full of the exploits of botanists, explorers, the famous orchid hunters of the nineteenth century. It had been a very different game in those days, when prized orchids could fetch extraordinary sums of money, and hunters took to the forest with great armies of coolies. Back then, there’d been a certain romanticism, or so it had seemed to Manne as a boy. Few of the territories had been properly explored, and the hunters had to wander far off the map for months or years at a time. Well before the turn of the century, though, things had changed. Many of the mysteries of orchid fertilisation had been unlocked; nurseries had begun to breed them by the thousands in Europe and America. Orchid mania had subsided with their easier availability. Hunters now operated alone or with just a few hired hands, and if their earnings were sufficient, they were generally modest. Orchid hunting was past its prime. It was no longer the business of gentleman explorers and their aristocratic patrons. Rather, it was a marginal world of the exiled, the eternally restless – the men from nowhere and everywhere.
They were back at the main camp. It felt disconcerting to see people again – convicts and guards wandering about aimlessly up and down the dirt thoroughfare. At the commandant’s office, they stopped for a few minutes.
‘You were talking about orchids,’ the commandant said as he shuffled through some papers. ‘That shipment I got from Florida. Cost me quite a bit. I wonder if there’s a business opportunity there. We could build nurseries here and export the orchids.’
Manne shook his head. ‘You’re too far from the main markets. And you’d need proper experts to set up and run the nurseries.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. Just thinking aloud. My wife, you know, she’s rather fond of orchids. That’s why I had them shipped out in the first place. I was going to build an orchid house for the garden.’
‘I was thinking about your garden. Seems there’s no one to look after it at the moment. Pity to see it go to ruin like that.’
The commandant sighed. ‘I had a gardener. A real professional. He did the landscaping. Really knew what he was doing. Sadly, there are so few like him. I would have done a lot for him. But what is one to do?’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Vanished!’ The commandant spat out the word with surprising bitterness. ‘Made off with Bonifacio’s gang, so they tell me. Robbed me of a few hundred francs to boot. After all I’d done for him. I’d even given him money. No, you can’t trust them. Not even the good ones.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. As for your garden, I don’t believe it’s beyond repair. The landscaping has mostly been finished. It’s a question of planting and upkeep. Replacing the turf is the main problem. I could set my man to the job. He has some experience with gardens, he tells me. I’m sure he could make headway fairly quickly.’
‘Very kind of you,’ the commandant replied distractedly. ‘Why don’t you see Charles about it?’ He was poring over his maps and plans. ‘I’ve lost faith in it myself, but if you think you can do something with it, by all means …’
Shortly after, they set off again down another track, the commandant ahead, striding on determinedly. If the governor’s secretary, Leblanc, represented one type of colonial administrator, with his squat figure, red face and expanding waistline, the commandant represented the opposite. Tall and thin, painfully thin, as if desiccated by life’s frustrations.
Manne was thinking about the commandant’s wife, about the fact that she hadn’t returned to the house, hadn’t turned up to lunch. An incident from his early childhood came back to him. There was a teenage girl who’d lived in a nearby village, whom Manne had known vaguely. Apparently, she’d been the victim of ‘improper advances’ from a local farmhand. Afterwards, she’d thrown herself into the river.
They’d arrived at an enormous clearing, surrounded by forest. The ground was a bog of baked mud, tree trunks and roots. The commandant gestured towards the vast empty space. ‘This is where we’re building the new penitentiary.’
Convicts were levelling the ground. Most were stripped to the waist, burnt nut brown under the sun. Many of them had tattoos; Manne noticed one of an entwined naked couple that moved suggestively when the convict’s back muscles were flexed.
The commandant had spread out plans on a sawn tree stump. ‘It’ll be very different from what you find at Saint-Laurent or in the other camps. I’m working from an American model. Large circular exterior walls; barred cells around the inside walls and a sentry station in the middle. That way enables better control, you see, better surveillance. At every moment, the guards will be able to see exactly what any prisoner is doing. The present system is chaos. We lock the prisoners into their barracks at night and leave them be till morning. You can imagine what goes on. Revenge killings. Gambling, theft. And all manner of perversity.’
As he spoke, the commandant continued to stare intently at his plans, making occasional annotations with a pencil, almost as though they were the important things, and the building site there simply to justify them.
‘Looks like a huge project,’ said Manne. ‘Where are you getting the stone from?’
Giant slabs were piled up on one side of the site, already sinking slowly into the mud.
‘Quarries upstream. On the other side of the river. Nothing here, of course, so we have to buy from the Dutch. And they bleed me dry for it.’
‘What’s the purpose of relocating the prisoners here?’
‘I want to free up the main avenue. So we can start rebuilding there. Start developing a proper commercial centre. The idea is to attract the traders, investors. Settlers. Open up the surrounding land, farm it, exploit it …’
‘I see. I didn’t realise how ambitious your plan was. You want to build a whole new settlement.’
‘That’s right. That’s exactly right. A fresh start.’
The sun was setting by the time they got back to the house. Manne climbed the stairs up to the landing. There was no light from under the woman’s door. He thought to go and knock anyway, but then heard the commandant coming up the stairs behind him
.
Back to his bedroom. He didn’t bother to light the lamps for the moment. Day and night in the tropics were such absolutes that the brief twilight – with its shadows, ambivalences – felt like a respite. He was still thinking of the woman; he’d been thinking of her the entire day. On the way back to the house, he’d formulated a credible apology in his head, and he strained to remember what it was now, but it was no good, he’d already forgotten it. He considered the possible escape route the commandant’s wife had sketched out to him – across the river to Albina, overland to Paramaribo, then a boat out. Not only was it the reverse of the route by which Manne had arrived in the Colony, but it was also more or less what he’d been planning on himself, when the time came to get Edouard out, should he ever find him. Then he thought for a while about the commandant’s project. The clearing with its gigantic circular building. A little like the hut where Manne had met his host’s wife, but blown up to a preposterous scale.
After that, he must have dozed off for a while, because a tap on the door woke him. Dinner would be served in fifteen minutes. Befuddled by sleep, he splashed some lukewarm water on his face, dressed and went down.
The woman was already there, seated. He’d expected her to be absent, or at least to make a late appearance. He certainly hadn’t imagined that she might transform herself in the way she had. Gone was the sloppy dressing, uncombed hair and unmade-up face. Sleekly groomed now, she was wearing a smart, low-cut top and skirt with discreet earrings and a small necklace of dark stones. The effect was insolently seductive – and quite different from the cocktail women of Saint-Laurent, with their showy outfits that overcompensated for the drabness of colonial life.
The commandant was beaming, in visibly good form. ‘Ah, there you are, Hartfeld. I was just telling Renée about our afternoon.’
Manne turned towards her. ‘Yes, your husband was good enough to show me around one of his construction sites.’
