Tropic Moon (5 page)

Not until later did Timar realize that this was Maria's husband: you sent him away while you were visiting his wife.

A match flared and an oil lamp lit up in the hut.

“Go on,” Bouilloux said. He stepped aside for the others.

Inside it was hotter yet—a cloying, human heat. There was a bitter smell that made Timar gag. He had only had an intimation of it before, when some sweat-soaked blacks had gone by.

With one hand, the woman who'd just lit the oil lamp wrapped a piece of cloth around her naked body. Bouilloux tore it off and threw it in the corner.

“Go get your two sisters! Especially the little one, hey?”

The whites seemed at home in the hut, except for Maritain perhaps. He looked ill at ease. There was a table, two old deck chairs, and a ratty cot that retained the damp impress of human bodies.

Three of the men sat down anyway, after drawing up the covers.

“Sit, boys!”

Timar had never been so hot before—not even in the midday sun. The heat seemed unhealthy to him, a feverish heat, the heat of a hospital. He felt physical disgust at the touch of things, at the walls themselves. And he kept looking to Maritain, who was still on his feet, too, though farther inside the hut.

“They're not the equal of Adèle!” Bouilloux shouted out to him.

“Come on, have a drink—it'll do you good.”

A glass was passed from hand to hand to Timar, one of three unwashed glasses. Bouilloux and the one-eyed logger had the others.

“To Adèle's health!”

It was straight Pernod. Timar gulped it down because he didn't have the courage to stand up against the others. He drank pinching his nostrils, nauseated by the glass as well as the liquid.

“Very clever to pretend you don't get it. But we've all had her.”

Something would have happened then if the door hadn't swung open. Maria came in first, an obliging smile on her lips. Behind her was a very slender young girl. The man nearest to the door grabbed her immediately.

Confusion followed. The hut wasn't big enough for everyone inside. They were all pressed up against each other.

The black women hardly said a thing. Some isolated words and broken phrases. Mostly they laughed—you could see their shining white teeth. Maria took a bottle of crème de menthe from under the mattress and they drained it after the Pernod.

There was a single awkward moment. The one-eyed logger had asked, “What are they saying in the village about Thomas's death?”

The three black faces lost their smiles, their welcoming appearance, even their submissiveness. The women said nothing, staring at the ground. Bouilloux restored the good mood with a loud cry, “Enough, enough—fuck that dirty black! Cheers, boys! You know what I say we do? Let's go for a ride in the jungle!”

Once again, as at dinner, there was a brief exchange of glances. Timar suspected that Bouilloux's words held a deeper meaning, that they'd hatched a plot.

“Just a moment! Listen, Maria—a hundred francs if you can scare up a bottle of whiskey. Or anything.”

She found the whiskey, though there wasn't a sound or light or whisper from the village. Everyone seemed to be asleep. From the huts, you couldn't help but hear what was going on.

Bits and pieces of conversation. They squeezed back onto the truck.

Near the trunk of a kapok tree stood a black woman no one had noticed until then.

“Hey you! Climb in!”

The noise of the starter and the engine made it impossible to hear anything more.

Timar didn't want to see a thing. Stubbornly he stared at the passing canopy of moonlit trees. They were driving on sand, and kept having to shift gears all the time.

Someone handed the bottle of whiskey to him, half empty and positively hot, its neck sticky. He couldn't drink. He pretended, though, letting the liquor dribble down his chin and onto his chest.

“…
but we've all had her
…”

He felt an agonizing impatience. There was only one thought in his head: to confront this animal Bouilloux, to demand an explanation. Because it wasn't true! It wasn't possible! Bouilloux, for example—he'd never been Adèle's lover. Nor the one-eyed man, nor …

He alternated between fury and despair. One moment, he imagined ordering them to stop the truck to let him out. But he didn't even know where he was. He didn't have any choice except to see the night through to its end in this company.

He calculated that they'd traveled something like fifteen miles. The truck came to a stop where the road itself ended, at the edge of a clearing by a river. The uproar started again, outbursts of talk and laughter.

“The bottle! Don't forget the bottle!” a shadow yelled out.

Timar remained alone by the little truck. No one noticed. In front of him, he saw figures going back and forth, sometimes zigzagging through the patches of light and shadow. He heard whispers and murmurs, raucous laughter.

Maritain's long shadowy figure was the first to come back. Not expecting it, he discovered Timar when he was only a yard away. Embarrassed, he stammered, “You were here all the time?! A man's got to have fun …”

Another shadowy figure—shorter and larger—slipped across the clearing. Suddenly, it came up.

“Quick! Get inside! This is going to be a scream!”

It was Bouilloux. Another shadow turned, then two, three. A black woman came after that.

“Hey, baby, just a second! Whites first!”

They piled into the truck. The three women waited their turn. The engine started up.

“Go!”

The truck sped off as fast as possible. The women were running after it shouting.

“Back, girls, back! Bye-bye!”

They were naked, absolutely naked, like jungle animals. The moon dappled them with silvery light. They were shrieking and waving their arms.

“Faster, faster! They could still catch up!”

The little truck was straining violently. They hit a tree stump and nearly tipped over. It was a close shave.

The black women were still running, but they were gradually falling behind. Their outlines grew smaller and more distant, their voices fainter.

That was it—they'd lost them!

There were a few giggles, no more, and some stray comments.

“Who was the big fat one?”

Next to Timar, Maritain bowed his head.

A few obscenities, too. But as they drove farther, they fell silent. They became increasingly grim and despondent.

“I have a summons from the chief of police for tomorrow.”

“Me, too.”

“And Adèle? Speaking of which, we should take up a collection for a wreath.”

It was hot and cold. Timar's body was covered in sweat and his shirt was drenched. The air seemed too hot for his lungs and yet the breeze the truck made was freezing him.

He'd started at the sound of Adèle's name. The moon was lower, behind the trees, and he could no longer see his companions. But he knew which corner Bouilloux was sitting in.

“Speaking of Adèle, I want you to tell me …”

His voice sounded so false that he was thrown off. He lapsed into silence.

“What do you want to know? Have fun if you want, like we did tonight. Just don't knock her up.”

He said nothing. They dropped him off by the edge of the pier. He'd shaken only one hand, Maritain's. Maritain had stammered, “See you tomorrow.”

Timar was alone in the night. There was one light shining on the second floor of the hotel. He tried to open the door but it was locked, and he didn't want to make a noise by knocking. There was the dead man, for one thing. He was so jittery that his knees were shaking. He was filled with irrational fear.

He headed around the house to the courtyard door. A stray cat running away made him start. He was shivering even though he was covered in sweat, and it made him wonder if he was falling ill. The slightest movement made him sweat. He could feel himself sweating and smell himself sweating, could feel every pore of his body spitting out sweat.

The courtyard door was also locked. When he returned to the front, the door swung open.

There was Adèle, a candle in her hand, wearing her usual black silk dress and as calm as ever. There was just room for Timar to slip in the door before it closed behind him again. The candle stopped flickering in the café. He tried to think of something to say. He was appalled, furious at himself, at her, at the whole world. He was more upset than he had ever felt in his life.

“You weren't asleep?”

He looked at her suspiciously and had an unexpected reaction. Was it because of the disgusting displays he'd witnessed that night? Or was it more like an angry protest, a yearning for vengeance?

He gave way, in any case, to a mean, brutal impulse.

“Your new room's on the left.”

He followed her like a coward to the stairs they would both have to climb. He knew she'd stop and let him lead the way with the light.

Right then he grabbed her by the waist, but without really knowing what he meant to do.

She didn't struggle. She was still holding the candle, and a drop of hot wax fell onto Timar's hand. She simply pulled away from him. She was a woman, but her torso was muscular and strong—too strong for him to press her to him. All she said was, “You're drunk, my dear. Go get some sleep.”

He gave her a troubled look. He saw her pale face in the dancing candlelight and her shapely lips that seemed in spite of everything to be forming a smile that was both ironic and tender.

He hurried awkwardly upstairs, tripped, and went to the wrong door. Without any anger, she said, “It's the door on the left.”

After he shut the door, he heard her climbing the stairs. She opened a door and closed it behind her. At last, one after the other, two slippers fell to the floor.

A
T THE
cemetery Timar was overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of emotion. He felt utterly displaced. The feeling washed over him and filled him and left him almost gasping as if he'd been knocked to the ground by a breaker.

Displaced—by the picturesque details, the jaunty palms, the singsong of native speech, the milling black bodies.

But there was something else, too—the clarity and desperation with which he understood that to leave Africa you had to go by boat. There was one every month, and it took three weeks to get to France.

It was eight in the morning. They'd left the Hotel Central at seven to miss the worst of the heat. But the heat wasn't only from the sun: it rose from the ground, the walls, everything. Your own body even gave off heat!

Timar had gone to bed at four. He'd felt sick ever since he got up, which convinced him that he must have been drunker than he'd thought.

The loggers were there, along with Maritain and the rest of the regulars. As in a provincial town, they were stationed in groups several yards from the door. The only difference was that here everyone was dressed in white and that everyone was wearing a sun helmet, even Adèle, who emerged from behind the coffin wearing her black silk dress.

The hearse was the little truck from the night before, now covered in black cloth.

They set out walking along the red dirt road. They turned into a small steep lane lined with native huts. Was one of them Maria's?

In spite of the heat, they walked quickly: if the truck slowed down too much its engine stalled. Adèle took the lead. She was alone and walking quite normally. She looked about and sometimes turned around, like someone in charge.

Finally they reached the cemetery. It was at the top of a hill overlooking the sea and the town. To the left a river flowed out of the jungle. A red-and-black cargo ship was taking on a load of lumber.

Was it because of the purity of the air? In spite of the distance, you could make out the smallest details: some rafts being towed by a very small tugboat with a chugging diesel engine; the clanking chains with which they were securing the stacks of lumber; the creaking cranes.

Farther out was the ocean—ocean and nothing but ocean, three whole weeks of it going full steam ahead before you saw the coast of France!

Was this really a cemetery? There'd been an attempt to respect European tradition. There were two or three stone tombs, a couple of wooden crosses. Even so, it was hardly what you would have expected: no chapel, no enclosing wall, no gate; just a hedge of outlandish shrubbery with monstrous red berries that only underscored how far away Europe was. And the earth was red. Right in the open, at a distance of a hundred yards, you could make out a row of rectangular unmarked mounds—the native graveyard. And in the middle of it, a gigantic baobab tree.

People who hadn't joined in the procession had driven over and were waiting, smoking cigarettes. Among them were the governor and the territorial administrator. They bowed to Adèle.

It had to be done quickly because there was no shade. You could hear the cargo being loaded throughout the ceremony. The pastor was uncomfortable.

In his life, Eugène Renaud had been a Catholic as much as he was anything. But the local curate had left on a tour of the interior several days earlier, and the Anglican pastor had agreed to officiate in his place.

Four blacks slid the coffin into the too-shallow hole. They used hoes to rake the dirt over it.

The idea that one day he might also be interred like this made Timar unbearably conscious of his life since La Rochelle. This wasn't a cemetery! This wasn't a burial! He wasn't at home!

He was sleepy. His stomach ached. He was afraid of the heat that filtered under his helmet and burned his neck like a branding iron.

Everybody headed back to the town. He tried to walk apart, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure beside him, the tall figure of Maritain, who mumbled nervously, “Did you sleep well? By the way, have you received a summons, too? It seems that the governor wants to take part in the questioning.”

Timar vaguely recognized the market and made out the lane the police station was on. His shirt was sticking to his armpits. He was thirsty.