Ambiguous Adventure (12 page)

Madame Martial came in and called them to the table.

The pastor, who was getting ready to ask a blessing on the meal, noticed that Samba Diallo had preceded him in prayer. The young man had retired within himself for a brief moment, with an imperceptible murmur.

Dinner began. Lucienne turned toward Samba Diallo:

“You know, Papa just missed starting his ministry in Africa. He hasn’t yet told you about it?”

“Ah?” Samba Diallo’s voice had a rising inflection as he looked at the pastor and his daughter in turn.

“It’s an old story, all that.” The pastor spoke with a hint of melancholy. “I dreamed of founding a mission in Africa, in some open countryside where no soldier, no doctor, good or bad, would have preceded me. We should have presented ourselves supplied only with the word of God. Our task being one of evangelization, I should carefully have avoided taking anything in, even the least cumbersome and the most useful of medicaments. My wish was that the revelation of which we should have been the missionaries would owe nothing except to itself, and
for us would be literally an imitation of Jesus Christ. For the rest, I was not waiting only for the edification of those who would be converted. I was counting, with the help of God, that the example of your faith would have revived our own, that the Negro church which we should have raised up would very quickly have taken over for us in the combat for the faith.… When I unbosomed myself of this project to my superiors, they had no difficulty in enlightening me as to my naïveté.”

When the pastor fell silent, Samba Diallo had the impression that he had hastened to cut short the evocation of his old dream. “He has not said everything,” the young man thought. “He has not told us either that he was not convinced by his superiors, although he submitted to them, or what great debate must have divided him from himself.”

“I say to myself, for my own part,” he said to the pastor, “that it is infinitely regrettable that your dream should not have been followed out.”

“Eh? Do you really believe that it was more urgent to send you pastors than to send you physicians?” Lucienne demanded.

“Yes, if you are thus offering me a choice between faith and the health of the body,” Samba Diallo replied.

“We must congratulate ourselves that it is only a hypothetical question,” Lucienne said. “I am sure that if fate should propose that choice to you—”

“Fate has proposed that choice to me, it is still proposing it to me at the present time. My country is dying because it dare not settle this alternative once and for all.”

“In my opinion,” she retorted, “that is just plain mad.”

“Come, come, Lucienne,” her mother put in.

The girl’s face was pink with both exasperation and confusion. She was turning in succession toward the pastor and Samba Diallo, as if undecided between the two. It seemed that the same feeling moved the two men. In their eyes, on their lips, there was the same look of affectionate disapprobation.

“I did not mean to question the value of faith,” Lucienne said at last, in a voice that was once more calm. “I only wanted to say that the possession of God ought not to cost man any of his chances.”

“I know that very well,” Samba Diallo said. “The offensiveness of this choice is something which makes it difficult to admit. Nevertheless it exists—and it seems to me to be a product of your history.” Then he added, with, it seemed, an aftermath of asperity, “For my part, if the direction of my country devolved upon me, I should admit your doctors and your engineers only with many reservations, and I do not know whether I should not have combatted them at the first encounter.”

“Know at least in what company you would find yourself, in that combat,” said Lucienne. “Your cause is defensible, perhaps; the sad thing is that those who defend it do not always have your purity and Papa’s. They ally themselves with this cause to cover up designs that would move backward.”

Samba Diallo’s expression had suddenly grown sad.

HAVING SUCCEEDED, WITH A SLOW MOVEMENT, in girding Demba’s head with the white turban, the teacher of the Diallobé undertook the interminable task of crouching down on his heels. With his left hand he supported himself on one knee, while the right hand, palm open, was descending, trembling, toward the ground. When it had got so far the left hand followed. Those who were present watched, motionless.

No one in the world, certainly, had crouched down like this so many times in his life as the teacher of the Diallobé, for no one had prayed so much as he. Old age and rheumatism had made of this gesture—still repeated twenty times a day—a grotesque and painful exercise which the watchers, moved and breathless, were following.

The man set himself to bending his knees, so that they might touch the ground. As he did this the whole framework of his body began, with them, to make a cracking sound. Suddenly he collapsed and remained motionless for as long as it took him to get his breath. From one corner of the company around him came a feeble sob, quickly repressed.

The old man, stretched out on the earth on his stomach, rolled over so as to rest on his back, and paused again to breathe. Supporting himself on his bent elbows, he
straightened his head and shoulders, and at last reached a sitting position. A sigh rose from those present, which covered the teacher’s own smile. Then silence reigned.

“I am nothing,” said the teacher, panting. “I beg you to believe with me, like me, that I am nothing: only a minute echo which claimed, while it lasted, to be swollen with the Word. A ridiculous claim. My voice is a thin little sound stifled by what is not my voice. The Word by which my voice claims to be swollen is the universal outflowing. My voice cannot make its miserable sound heard—a sound already twice corked up and imprisoned. The being is there, before it is raised; then it is killed. Do you feel how it is that I am the vain echo?”

“We feel it,” said the fool, repressing a new sob.

“The Word weaves together what is, more intimately than the light weaves the day. The Word overflows your destiny, from the side of the project, from the side of the deed, being the three from all eternity. I worship the Word.”

“Master, what you say is beyond us,” the smith put in.

“I was not speaking to you.”

“Speak to us.”

The teacher looked at the man, and his gaze seemed to pierce him through and through.

“One morning, then,” he said to him, “you wake up. The dark flood has receded far, after a hard upsurge: it is indeed you, and not another in your place, that has awakened. This heavy anxiety that distends your being just as the light spreads—it is you whom it fills; this man who is terrified by being recalled to the thought of death—this is you. You thrust the anxiety aside and get up. You believe in God. You prostrate yourself and pray. This family,
devoid of food and certain of eating today—it is your family, waiting for you to feed it. You hate it; you also love it. Here you are smiling at it and brooding over it, as you get up and go out into the street. Those whom you encounter are in your image; you smile at them, they smile at you; you bite them, they bite you; you love them and you loathe them; you approach them, then you move away from them. You get the best of them and they hit you. You return to your home, exhausted and weighed down with food. Your family eats, you smile, they smile, satisfied; you are annoyed: you must go out again. This family, in need of nourishment and sure of eating, it is your family waiting for you to feed it. This man who rebels against being recalled to the thought of his death, it is you—who thrusts that thought aside and gets up. You believe in God, you prostrate yourself and pray.… Of whom have I spoken?”

“Of me, master,” said the smith, cast down.

“No,” said the teacher, “it was of myself.”

For the second time, the fool burst into sobs, shameless and powerful.

“Was anyone ever so familiar with the summits as this old man who weeps over his failure to reach them?” Demba was thinking. “He suffers from giddiness, and he gives place to me. He believes that his giddiness is due to his great age. He is right. My youth will allow of more temerity. It is more obtuse, and it is well that it should be so. He hesitates, I will make short work of problems. But is this indeed a matter of age? Samba Diallo, at my age, would also have hesitated; that is certain. Then, I am obtuse. But I shall make short work of problems.”

The Most Royal Lady expressed her satisfaction:

“It is well that this young man should replace the
teacher. He has not, he never will have, that preference of the old man for traditional values, even those that are condemned and moribund, over the triumphant values that are assailing us. This young man is bold. He is not paralysed by the sense of what is sacred. He has no feeling for background. He will know better than anyone else how to welcome the new world. As for my young cousin—Samba Diallo also will have lived his life, spiritually. Poor child, he should have been born as the contemporary of his ancestors. I believe that he would have been the spiritual guide for them. Today—today—”

“Why did it happen that I let him go?” the chief of the Diallobé asked himself. “He is of the same age as this young man who has just been made teacher of the Diallobé. I would have made him chief of the Diallobé in my place, unless the teacher had chosen him to wear his turban. He would have kept the movement of the Diallobé within the confines of the narrow track that winds between their past and those new fields where they want to pasture and gambol and be lost. Instead, here am I today, faced by this young man, alone with him, abandoned by my old companion and master.”

The old companion, meanwhile, was laughing. The chief of the Diallobé gazed at him, curious as to what new shift of mood was amusing him, when the tears he had drawn from the fool were scarcely dried. It was precisely the fool who was now moving him to delight. Buttoned up in his military tunic, the madman had knelt down opposite the teacher, very near, and was speaking to him, holding his arm the while. The same laughter relaxed both their faces, very close to each other, as if they were seeking not to be overheard by any of the people around them.

“Will you say the prayer now, master?” the chief asked.

The old man gently pushed the fool away, faced Demba, and held out his arms in a gesture of prayer. All those present followed his example.

At the end of the prayer Demba announced that beginning the next day he would change the schedules at the Hearth. In this way, all the parents who might so desire would be able to send their sons to the foreign school. “For,” he concluded, “the Prophet—may benediction be upon him!—has said, ‘You are to go in search of Knowledge, even if it must be as far as China.’ ”

At first glance, Samba Diallo recognized the writing of the chief of the Diallobé. He seized the letter and went running up the stairs.

His cousin had written:

“How can man, whose fate it is to grow old and then to die—how can he claim to govern: which is the art of having, at every moment, the age and the desires of the generation which changes and does not grow old? No one has known the country of the Diallobé as I have known it. I was the eminence which welcomed and reflected the first rays that came from the depths of the world. Always, I went ahead, and I felt neither anxiety nor self-conceit. But at the same time I was the rear-guard. I had never been satisfied that the desires of the last of the Diallobé should not have been fulfilled. Those were good times, when I controlled this country without any one of us stealing a march on any other.”

Samba Diallo paused for a moment in his reading. “He was himself, he was the country,” he thought, “and this unity was not broken by any division. Oh, my country, within the circle of your frontiers the one and the many
were still linked together yesterday. I know very well that I did not dream that! The chief and the multitude, power and obedience, they were of the same breed, and cousins close-born. Knowledge and faith flowed from a common source and fed the same sea. Within your frontiers it was still given to man to enter the world by the great portal. I have been the sovereign who, one step away from the master, could cross the threshold of all unity, penetrate to the intimate heart of being, invade it and make one with it, without any one of us overstepping the other. Chief of the Diallobé, why have I had to cross the frontier of your kingdom?”

The chief’s letter went on:

“Today everything fled and crumbled around my immobility, as the sea does along a reef. I am no longer the point of reference, the landmark; I am the obstacle which men walk around in order not to hit it. If you could see their expressions as they watch me! They are full of solicitude and pity—of brutal determination also. The hour strikes when, if I had this choice at my disposal, I should choose to die.

“Alas, I cannot even do as your old teacher did, lay aside that part of myself which belongs to men and leave it within their hands, while I withdraw.

“One evening he came to me, according to that old custom which you know. The fool, who never leaves him now, was holding him by the arm, and they were both laughing like children, pleased to be together. ‘Here is the valley about to take leave of the mountain,’ the fool said, and I suddenly felt sad through and through, as I had not done since the death of my father. ‘The deep valley where the heart of the world is beating,’ the fool went on. But the
teacher interrupted him: ‘Hush! Be still! You have promised me to behave yourself. If you do not, we will go away again.’ At that the fool fell silent.

“I did not take my eyes off the teacher. He was not sad.

“ ‘Tomorrow,’ he said to me, ‘I shall put the turban on Demba, if it please God.’

“ ‘That can only result in good, if you have so decided,’ I acquiesced.

“ ‘Have you perceived how stupid I am?’ he inquired. ‘For a long time I have felt that I was the only obstacle to this country’s happiness. I have pretended not to be that obstacle. I was hoping—but it is only now that I know this—that the country would carry me over, so that it might obtain its happiness without my losing my good conscience.’