by Maryse Conde
I soon realized that Azélia had nothing in common with Thécla. She became my mistress. I discovered that Dr. Zourou drove his boys to a Catholic school near his clinic at seven in the morning and returned home only at nightfall. Azélia therefore remained alone all day long, cleaning, washing, ironing, and cooking the evening meal. One morning I dropped in without warning and, taking advantage of her inexperience, I possessed her. She wept at seeing the great stain of scarlet blood on the sheets that no griot would proudly display to the family. I failed to convince her not to make a secret of our love.
“Louis must never know!” she insisted frenziedly. “Like everyone in our family, he hates Northerners.”
“I’m not a Northerner!” I protested. “I’m Malian; half Bambara, half Guadeloupean.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s all the same!”
I protested again. “It’s not at all the same! Certain regions of Africa, like the north of this country, such as Ivory Coast, Mali, and parts of Guinea, speak Malinke. That’s all. Their people speak the same language.”
She paid no attention whatsoever to what she thought a pedantic history lesson.
Dr. Zourou kept his promise. A few days later, an official letter informed me that I had been appointed Director of the Social Rehabilitation Center. Given the paltry salary being offered, I could see why they had had trouble finding a head doctor. The Center was located on the road to Grand Popo in the buildings of a hotel complex which had been closed due to the lack of tourists. The pavilions, which had once been in perfect condition, now lacked water, electricity, and sanitary appliances and were scattered along a beach where the sea constantly vomited up corpses, some of which were horribly mutilated. It was rumored they were the bodies of opponents of Dioclétien—he who had rapidly shaken off the appearance of a simple religious nut and revealed his thirst for power.
The Center housed about twenty young girls who had been raped by soldiers from both camps, North and South. Some of them carried the fruit of this aggression on their backs. The hospital in Danembe, however, had wonderful facilities. The only cure for aches and pains I could prescribe was quinine or antidiarrheals such as Ganidan.
I very quickly realized that I had found my true vocation. I was not made to be an obstetrician in a luxurious clinic, but to remain in close contact with the misery of this world. These young victims could very well have been Ali’s sisters, the migrant from Eburnéa on his way back to Europe. Out of respect for them I endeavored as best I could to put things in order, since the Center was in total chaos. The medical staff laid their hands on the few drugs sent by the Red Cross and sold them to the highest bidder. I suspected even more sinister dealings, but decided to turn a blind eye.
I could have relished a certain happiness if my mother hadn’t spoiled things; she had become a genuine killjoy of my nights.
“Don’t tell me this girl looks like me,” she thundered. “She’s stupid.”
It’s true, although Azélia’s eyes sometimes resembled my mother’s, the resemblance stopped there. She had nothing of the intellectual about her, tortured by the major problems of the world. She was not like my grandmother either, a woman of action determined to work for the welfare of her own kind. She was a shy individual whom you might qualify as passive. She bore the name of Azélia because a young priest, before returning home to the Cévennes, had given an azalea plant to her mother, who was pregnant and who scrubbed the floors of the presbytery every week. Once planted, it had withered and failed to turn green. But one day when her mother came to water it, she discovered it had flowered. The very same morning, her waters broke and she gave birth to a baby girl.
“This story is a load of nonsense,” my mother joked. “What is the relationship between her mother watering the azalea and her waters breaking shortly afterwards? What is the meaning of such a metaphor? To think that you’ll go through so much suffering for such an insipid individual!”
What suffering? Hadn’t I done enough suffering? For the first time, I had doubts about her clairvoyance. I was convinced that soon would come the time of happiness and peace. I ended up telling myself that my mother was jealous of Azélia because she had never had to share my heart with anybody.
One morning, which had started like any other, I found Azélia kneeling in front of a pile of washing and crying her heart out. When I plied her with questions, she ended up confessing that she was expecting a baby. My heart skipped a beat. A baby! Never had I felt so happy. Seized by a feeling of infinite gratitude, I took her in my arms. I then saw she was trembling and chilled to the bone. I reproached her tenderly.
“Don’t cry! We have been blessed. We’re in Heaven.”
She didn’t seem to be listening. “I’m scared,” she murmured.
“Of what?”
“Of them! Of the family! They’ll never accept my giving birth to a baby by a Northerner. They’ll kill either me or the baby.”
“I’ve already told you I’m not a Northerner,” I insisted, exasperated.
She was so despondent that my words meant nothing to her. I let things be.
“Now we have to get married,” I decreed.
She shook her head sadly. “Why do you want to marry me? What can I possibly give you in life?”
I didn’t take the trouble to answer.
The very next morning I paid Dr. Zourou a visit. His new clinic was situated in a poor neighborhood awash in filth. I avoided as best I could the stray dogs hanging around on the sidewalks. In the courtyard, midwives in filthy blouses carried slop pails, which they emptied out into a stinking, open-air ditch.
“No water or electricity for two days,” Dr. Zourou explained. “We manage as best we can. What fair wind or, rather, what fierce wind brings you here?”
I told him the reason for my visit. When I stopped, he stared at me with eyes brimming with hatred. A cold, resolute, murderous hatred. A hatred that went far beyond my person. I felt it encompass my ethnic group, my culture, my origins—notions that I myself didn’t believe in, but who cares!
“So,” he thundered, “even though you’re a Northerner I welcomed you into my house. I found you a job. And all you can do is get my little sister pregnant, an innocent little girl who has never before been with a man.”
I didn’t know what to say to defend myself.
“You’re a swine, like the rest of your lot!” he bellowed.
I put up with his crude insults, firstly because I didn’t want to make things worse, and secondly because I convinced myself they were deserved.
Dr. Zourou calmed down and continued. “On the subject of your marriage, my opinion counts for little, you know. Only the Old Man could give his permission.”
“Why would he be against it?” I exclaimed. “I’m an honest man.”
His answer was filled with contempt. “Nowadays, who would want to marry his daughter to a Dyula?”
“I’m not a Dyula!” I shouted for the umpteenth time. “I’m a Bambara. Well, half a Bambara.”
But I knew it was a waste of time arguing over this point.
“You’ll have to go and see him in our village of Tempe.”
Tempe was the capital of a coastal province. This strip of land, curiously named Barbary Tongue, had been trampled over very early on by Catholic priests who had accomplished massive conversions and built churches and schools with logs. The first “African civil servants” came from there. Jean, Azélia’s father, had been the parish priests’ houseboy. He had washed their underpants caked with sperm and shit, ironed their cassocks, and secretly delivered them young boys and girls at night. His relationship to the new president made him a notable, out of reach of any gossip.
After a few ceremonious words aimed at officially requesting his daughter’s hand, I slipped him an envelope stuffed with bank notes, which I had prepared on Azélia’s advice.
“It’s our
custom,” she had insisted. “You absolutely have to respect it.”
I was not of the same opinion. A true son of my mother, I believed that customs resembled the branches of a tree. If they had outlived their time and were rotten, they had to be pruned.
Jean Zourou opened the envelope I had handed him, rudely counted the contents in full view of everyone, then sealed it up again and stuffed it in his pocket. He didn’t even bother to say thank you, and walked out of the room after hastily shaking my hand. The meeting was over.
Azélia and I both climbed back into the car. The night lay heavy over the palm-oil plantations and clusters of bats darted upwards towards the sky. The sea, too, turned to black. For the first time I was scared stiff. I was panicking for some unknown reason. It was as if the future was marching toward me, baring its fangs like those of a hound about to leap at my throat.
“Don’t go home to Louis tonight. Stay with me,” I urged Azélia.
To my surprise, she who was as a rule so pusillanimous and little concerned about pleasing me accepted, and from that moment on moved in with me. I wrote to her father and Louis to fix a date for the wedding but neither of them answered. As a result, the ceremony took place one Saturday afternoon with two friends of Azélia’s as witnesses.
Despite these circumstances, I was in a state of indescribable bliss. Azélia was all mine, and more relaxed and less nervous than she had ever been. Yet I sensed it wouldn’t last. I was like a navigator at sea who felt he was sailing into a formidable, perhaps even murderous, squall. In the meantime, I clasped my beloved passionately in my arms and endeavored not to think about it.
Although Azélia was totally inexperienced with sex when we first met, she knew instinctively how to pleasure me and that soon became sheer delight. Nights seemed too short; we made love like persons possessed until daylight burst through the windows. We were oblivious to time and to the war as well.
Alas! This truce came to an early end.
One morning, shortly after I had arrived for work, half a dozen police cars with sirens screaming converged on the Center. Passersby, sensing a drama, stood stock-still on the sidewalk while policemen shot out of their vehicles. The police shoved open the gates and made straight for my office. I asked them in surprise the reason for this show of force. By way of an answer, one of them slapped me roughly and yelled, “You’re the one we’ve come to get!”
Without further ado I was thrown to the ground. Finally, in front of a stupefied crowd of staff and patients I was dragged downstairs and shoved brutally into one of their jeeps. From there I was driven the thirty or so kilometers to the infamous prison of Toh Boh Nel.
The Toh Boh Nel prison has a terrible reputation. During colonial times, it accommodated the hotheads from French West Africa, all those who dreamed of justice and freedom for their people and rotted behind its massive walls. That’s where the famous Ariba Arozo wrote his poem “Whatever you do, Africa will survive” on toilet paper and entrusted it to a friendly prison guard. I was told that the reason for my arrest was that I was accused of spying for the Resistance Forces from the North. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess who had denounced me. In order to ruin my marriage with Azélia, I suppose.
I spent the first days of my imprisonment lying prostrate on my prison bed, thinking only of Azélia. My cellmates numbered three: Isaac and Marc, two little thugs who claimed to be Patriots so as to terrorize the neighborhood, rape girls, and kill their opponents, and Jérôme Dagny, who had not been arrested for political reasons. Jérôme was a distinguished gentleman, elegantly attired in his coarse blue prison uniform, and a crook, a first-class drug dealer and shady businessman whose fortune had been ill-gotten. We all know life is surprising. Although we were very different from each other, Jérôme and I were to become close friends. Many saucy things are rumored about prison life, that it is a source of homosexual relationships. But in my prison there was nothing of the sort. The only oddity was that Jérôme had managed to hide his pack of tarot cards, and from morning to night tried to predict the future.
“Like me, you won’t stay long here,” he assured me. “I can soon see us outside, free as the air.”
My mother repeated the same thing every night. “Your prison sentence will be very short.”
Yet these predictions were of little comfort. I was convinced I would never see Azélia again, my beloved Azélia. If Jérôme hadn’t been there to constantly cheer me up, I can bet you that at the present time I would already be dead.
One evening, shortly before we turned in for bed, the wardens burst open the cell door. Jérôme’s name had been cleared and he was free to go back to his fraudulent dealings, his misappropriations of all sorts, and his drug trafficking.
From that day on I fell into a kind of daze. I was supposed to stand trial, but no lawyer was to be seen and nobody investigated my case. On Tuesdays, with my hoe over my shoulder, I accompanied the other prisoners to go and weed the state-run palm grove at Gnossoumabe. We walked through several villages where the inhabitants came out of their huts to watch us pass and shower us with insults. I guessed, nevertheless, that in their hearts they felt pity for us and they only acted in such a manner to please the guards.
When you’re in jail you’ve no notion of time, and I had no idea how many weeks and months had passed. One night, my mother appeared.
“It’s over!” she murmured with a sigh of deliverance. But she added, “Now comes the difficult part for you.”
I awoke amid the din of the cell’s heavy doors opening. The guards shoved us out by the shoulders into the prison yard where trucks were waiting to drive us to the police headquarters in Eburnéa. We were free.
It was early May, the start of the rainy season. An iron-gray sky weighed heavily over the town. The rain filled the gutters with a foul-smelling flow of water and transformed the soil into a brownish puree.
I had spent ten months of my life in the prison of Toh Boh Nel, slightly more than at the camp in Danembe. It was a lot and yet very little. Some people would say that I was lucky to get out of this living hell alive. Others, convinced I was innocent, claimed I had been a victim.
I almost didn’t recognize Jérôme who, to my surprise, was waiting for me. He was bursting with health, dressed all in white, his face lined with the thick mustache of a Cuban singer. He had turned over a new leaf, married again—a woman called Alice—and bought a villa in Bassora, in the midst of the palm groves. The only thing he remained true to was his game of tarot. During the drive to Bassora, he explained to me how the country had changed.
“The war’s over! As a result of a grandiose reconciliation between the North and the South, your friend, Hassan, has become vice president, while Dioclétien remains president. A real load of crap. Two men so different will never agree on how to govern. Dioclétien will soon make short work of him.”
I reacted to the news with perfect indifference. All that belonged to a world that was no longer and had never been mine. Only one question mattered to me: where was Azélia?
“Be brave. I heard she was … dead,” Jérôme murmured.
“Dead? Azélia?” I stammered. “That’s impossible. And what about our child?”
“I believe she never came into this world,” he sighed. “She died in her mother’s womb.”
I broke down.
If it was true, I would have felt it deep down. And then Thécla would have warned me in a dream, despite her lack of affection for Azélia—but she had never conveyed to me the terrible news. That night I didn’t sleep, despite the long-lost comfort of a soft bed. The following morning, in spite of the weather, which was worse than the day before, I dashed to Dr. Zourou’s clinic. It was no longer there. The building it once occupied appeared deserted. When I tried to interrogate a bunch of idlers sprawled on the sidewalk they ran off as if a miserable wretch in rags such as myself had scared them away. I took a taxi to his
villa but he no longer lived there. The servants assured me they had never heard of him. Why was I so convinced they were lying and making fun of me? They directed me to their employer, the owner of a pharmacy situated two streets away. Unfortunately, he was absent and the staff had no idea when he would be back.
I begged the taxi driver to take me to Tempe. I had kept a pleasant memory of this small town despite the fierce wind that blew in from the sea. That day under the rain it looked entirely different. The leaden sea roared like a wild animal in heat. Azélia’s father now lived in a well-built house, the biggest in Tempe. My unexpected arrival caused a genuine panic and the wives and co-wives stopped pounding the plantains for the midday meal. I was shown into a dining room filled with the latest furniture wherein Zourou came to join me after a long wait. Although he was visibly more prosperous than he used to be, chubby-cheeked and heavyset, he had really aged, or put on years, as they say crudely.
“Poor, poor Azélia! She’s dead!” he sobbed to begin with. “My darling little girl is dead.”
He stammered out a torrent of explanations. “After your arrest, life became unbearable for her. She first of all had a miscarriage, and if it hadn’t been for her stepmother, she would have passed away.”
He sobbed even louder. “As soon as she could walk again, she ran off and walked to the prison of Toh Boh Nel. There, she begged the guards to let her see you. She swore you were not to blame and were as innocent as a baby. The guards told her to never come back. Even so, she did come back. One day, out of exasperation, they gave her such a thrashing that she died.”
Why did I have the firm conviction that he was lying as well? He had made up his story from start to finish. Deep down, I refused to believe it.
“Where is she buried?” I stammered. “I want to see her grave.”
He sobbed louder still. “They never returned her body to us. We believe they threw her into a common grave somewhere around the prison.”
