Ambiguous Adventure (15 page)

The woman who had just spoken was a fat half-breed, covered with jewels, who was fixing a maternal gaze upon Samba Diallo.

“Good, good,” the old fool complied with his orders. “Young man, this is my wife, Adèle. Such as you see her, in spite of her shrieks, she is of royal blood, being a Gabonaise princess.”

So speaking, Pierre-Louis was keeping at a prudent distance from the fat princess. Samba Diallo bowed and took the heavy hand, abundantly adorned with rings, which was held out to him.

“That ray of sun down there, which is trying to hide from your gaze, that is my granddaughter. She has only one single imperfection, which, I must add, is not apparent at first glance: she is called Adèle, also.”

Samba Diallo was grateful to the beringed princess for the projectile—a folding fan—which she was waving back and forth over Pierre-Louis’ head. The laughter and movement around the room screened his confusion at the moment when he bowed before the apparition of the doorway and clasped a little hand which he thought he felt trembling in his.

“And here are my two sons, Captain Hubert Pierre-Louis, who is Adèle’s father, and Marc, who is an engineer.”

Samba Diallo exchanged two rugged handclasps.

“That,” concluded Pierre-Louis, comically, “will be all for this evening.”

“You have greatly impressed our father, Samba Diallo,” said Marc. “He has done nothing but talk of you.”

Samba Diallo showed his surprise, and was about to protest, when the beringed princess relieved him.

“I know the reason for Pierre-Louis’ enthusiasm,” she said. “You listened to him. Nothing impresses him so much—and, for the rest, myself also. I have known from that what an education you have.”

Everybody laughed, and Samba Diallo profited by that to yield to a furious desire to look at Adèle.

The girl, seated on the rug with her head against Pierre-Louis’ knee, was fixing her great eyes on Samba Diallo.

The young man, seeing that, had a sense of pleasure which he immediately regretted; then the regret itself surprised him.

“Come, come,” he said to himself. “One would say that Mbara was stirring. Look at him sending vulgar winks toward a young girl whom he is seeing for the first time.” Mbara, the typical name for a slave in the country of the Diallobé, was the soubriquet that Samba Diallo’s parents would use, when he was a child, to make him ashamed of some bad behavior.

He answered Marc:

“It is I who am grateful to your father for having conjured away the discouragement which was slowly pervading me, when I met him a month ago. I don’t know whether you have at times had that poignant impression
of vacuity which the streets of this city may give—streets nevertheless so noisy in other respects. There is, as it were, a great absence, one does not know of what. I was the victim of this sensation when I encountered your father, and I have had the feeling that he set me afloat in the current again.”

“You live alone?” Hubert inquired, practically.

“No, it is not that,” Marc interposed. “I have often heard colored men speak as Samba Diallo is speaking. I believe, for my part, that this impression comes from the fact that, paradoxically, they expect to find in Paris what they have left behind in order to come here. Isn’t that your opinion, Samba Diallo?”

“I don’t think it is the material environment of my country that I miss, if that is what you mean to say.”

“Ah.” Marc was interested, and spoke on a note of inquiry. “Then try to explain. You know, my father sent me here when I was a very young child, but I also feel a stranger in this country. I should very much like to know—”

He did not finish the sentence, and waited. Samba Diallo hesitated, not knowing what to say. His eyes sought those of Pierre-Louis, but the old man seemed to be waiting also.

“It is difficult,” Samba Diallo began at last. “It might be said that I see less fully here than in the country of the Diallobé. I no longer feel anything directly. You know, on reflection all this seems ridiculous to me. It may be, after all, that what I regret is not my country so much as my childhood.”

“Go on trying. Tell us the form that your nostalgia takes.”

“It seems to me, for example, that in the country of the Diallobé man is closer to death. He lives on more familiar terms with it. His existence acquires from it something like an aftermath of authenticity. Down there, there existed between death and myself an intimacy, made up at the same time of my terror and my expectation. Whereas here death has become a stranger to me. Everything combats it, drives it back from men’s bodies and minds. I forget about it. When I search for it in my thought, I see only a dried-up sentiment, an abstract eventuality, scarcely more disagreeable for me than for my insurance company.”

“In sum,” said Marc, laughing, “you are complaining of no longer living your death.”

They all laughed, and Samba Diallo, wholly acquiescent, laughed with them. Then he went on, seriously:

“It still seems to me that in coming here I have lost a privileged mode of acquaintance. In former times the world was like my father’s dwelling: everything took me into the very essence of itself, as if nothing could exist except through me. The world was not silent and neuter. It was alive. It was aggressive. It spread out. No scholar ever had such knowledge of anything as I had, then, of being.”

After a short silence he added:

“Here, now, the world is silent, and there is no longer any resonance from myself. I am like a broken balafong, like a musical instrument that has gone dead. I have the impression that nothing touches me any more.”

Pierre-Louis’ laughter resounded, short and harsh, through the room.

“Ha, ha, ha! I know what it is. It is not the material absence of your native soil that keeps you in a state of suspended animation, it is its spiritual absence. The West
passes you by, you are ignored, you are useless—and that at a time when you yourself can no longer pass by the West. Then you succumb to the complex of the Unloved. You feel that your position is precarious.”

Samba Diallo looked at Pierre-Louis, and this time it was not Adèle’s eyes that held him. The old fellow was grave, almost sad. “I know now the reason for this old man’s madness,” Samba Diallo said to himself. “He has been too clear-headed through the course of a too-long life.”

“It is only the intellectuals who suffer from that,” Captain Hubert cut in. “From the moment that the West agrees to give, what does it matter if it refuses to take? For my part, I am not embarrassed by that.”

“No,” Samba Diallo objected. “On the contrary, Captain, it is this attitude of yours which seems impossible to me, other than in theory. I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counter-balance. I have become the two. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two.”

But Marc was addressing Pierre-Louis:

“I should have liked to find an argument to refute what you have just said. For it seems to me that in a sense you have condemned us. How would the West have been able to pass us by if our message had not been, in some fashion, superfluous? The West victoriously pursues its investiture of the actual. There is no break in its advance. There is no instant that is not filled with this victory. It is not to the leisure to philosophize, of which we are making use at the present time, that we owe the efficacious vigor of the effort
by which the world is maintained over our heads like a shelter in the tempest. Can anything exist outside that effort, in consequence, which would have a meaning? I see very well what distinguishes us from them. Our first move is not to conquer, as they do, but to love. We also have our vigor, which takes us at once straight to the intimate heart of a thing. Our knowledge of it is so intense that its fullness intoxicates us. Then we have a sensation of victory. But where is that victory? The object is intact, the man is not stronger.”

Samba Diallo became excited.

“As for me,” he said, “I saw in your father’s words another reach of thought—how shall I say it?—more historic. The consequence of it would be less hopeless. It is not in a difference of nature between the West and what is not the West that I should see the explanation of the opposition in their destinies. If there were a difference of nature, it would follow in effect that if the West is right, and speaks in a loud voice, what is not the West is necessarily wrong and ought to be silent; that if the West moves beyond its borders and colonizes, this situation is in the nature of things and is definitive.…”

“Sure enough!” cried Pierre-Louis.

Samba Diallo began to smile then, suddenly assailed by a memory.

“I have an elderly cousin,” he said, “in whose mind reality never loses its just claims. She has not yet emerged from the astonishment into which the defeat and colonization of the Diallobé plunged her. They call her the Most Royal Lady. I should have not gone to the foreign school, and I should not be here this evening, if it had not been for her desire to find an explanation for our defeat. The day
I went to take leave of her she said to me again, ‘Go find out, among them, how one can conquer without being in the right.’ ”

“There is a woman who would not let herself tell tales about it, at least. She must be a very great princess.…”

As he said this, Pierre-Louis sent a sidelong glance toward the beringed princess, who had lost interest in the talk and, with Adèle, was going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining-table.

“Then you were saying?” Marc put in, addressing himself to Samba Diallo.

The latter seemed, then, to be in a hurry.

“I don’t think that this difference exists in nature,” he said again, “I believe that it is artificial, accidental. Only, the artifice has grown stronger with time, covering up what is of nature. What we miss so much in the West, those of us who come from the outlying regions, is perhaps that: that original nature where our identity bursts forth with theirs. The result is that the Most Royal Lady is right: their victory over us is also an accident. This feeling of exile which weighs upon us does not mean that we should be useless, but, on the contrary, establishes the necessity for us, and indicates our most urgent task, which is that of clearing the ground around nature. This task is ennobling.”

Captain Hubert fidgeted in his chair.

“I confess that I don’t understand,” he said. “All this seems to me too—how shall I say it?—too much divorced from reality. The reality is that we have great need of them and they are at our disposal. Or we are at theirs, it doesn’t much matter.”

“You are mistaken, Captain: it matters a great deal.”

He spoke in exasperation, but he felt ashamed of being so carried away, and he continued, more calmly:

“I understand your point of view very well, and in a sense I admit it. But excuse me for saying that it seems to me insufficient. You claim that the great need we have of the West leaves us no further choice, and merely authorizes submission, until the day when we shall have acquired mastery of them.”

“Since you understand so well,” said the captain, smiling, “will you explain to me why your generation does not accept the inevitable, and seems so badly to support that idea.”

“It is because if we accept it and accommodate ourselves to it, we shall never have the mastery of the object. For we shall have no more dignity than it has. We shall not dominate it. Have you noticed that? It’s the same gesture as that of the West, which masters the object and colonizes us at the same time. If we do not awake the West to the difference which separates us from the object, we shall be worth no more than it is, and we shall never master it. And our defeat will be the end of the last human being on this earth.”

The bejeweled princess broke in noisily.

“You, you new Negroes, you are degenerates,” she attacked them. “You do not know any more how to eat. You do not know any more how to pay attention to women. You spend your lives in frantic interminable debates. Now then, eat! When you have discovered again how to do that, you will have rediscovered everything.”

Pierre-Louis, with roundabout manoeuvers, was trying to have Samba Diallo sit beside him at the table. The princess noticed this.

“Come here, young man,” she called out. “You are to be between Adèle and me.”

“How right you are, Madame,” Samba Diallo said to her. “We are no longer living. We are empty of substance, and our head devours us. Our ancestors were more alive. Nothing separated them from themselves.”

“Isn’t that so?” the princess cried out in delight. “The men were full to bursting. They did not have any of your morose thoughts.”

“That,” declared Samba Diallo, “is because they had riches which we lose a little more every day. They had God. They had the family, which was only one single being. Within themselves they possessed the world. We are losing all that, little by little, in despair.”

“I am indeed of your opinion, Samba Diallo,” said Marc, fixing a touching gaze upon their visitor. “I am indeed of your opinion,” he repeated thoughtfully, in a lower tone.

The captain burst out laughing, and Samba Diallo gave a start.

“And you, my little Adèle—you are also of their opinion, aren’t you?” Captain Hubert demanded.

Adèle smiled confusedly, looked at Samba Diallo, then dropped her head without making any reply.

But the captain, abandoning his daughter, had turned toward Marc.

Samba Diallo was conscious that someone was speaking to him. It was Adèle, at whose left he had been seated. The girl had succeeded in conquering the overwhelming feeling of timidity which had paralyzed her in the presence of Samba Diallo ever since she had opened the door to him.

“I should like to say—” she began.

Samba Diallo encouraged her with a smile and leaned toward her, for she was speaking in a low tone, careful not to disturb the conversation going on among the men around her.

“I have never been in Africa, and I should so much like to go there,” she said. “It seems to me that if I were there I should learn very quickly to ‘understand’ things as you do. They must be so much more true, seen like that.”