Ambiguous Adventure (16 page)

“Perhaps that should not be, rightly,” he answered. “It is to learn to ‘understand’ otherwise that we are here, all of us who are not of the West. It is for that that you ought to be born here.”

“But that isn’t what I want! Here, everything is so arid. You know, I understood very well, when you were talking just now. How right you were!”

Her big eyes were fixed on Samba Diallo, full of hope, as if she were expecting him to give her, immediately, that power of “understanding” things and people which he had evoked.

“Would she really feel ‘exile’—this girl born on the banks of the Seine?” he was asking himself. “Yet she has never known any life but this. And her uncle Marc? At my first words they recognized themselves as belonging to us. The sun of their knowledge—can it truly be nothing to the darkness of our skin?”

Samba Diallo was far from suspecting the considerable effect which his words—those avowals which he had regretted as soon as he had uttered them—had produced on the girl who was “the exile on the banks of the Seine.” Adèle’s exile was in many respects even more dramatic than his own. He, at least, was a “half-breed” only by his
culture. The West had become involved in his life insidiously, with the thoughts on which he had been nourished every day since the first morning when he had entered the foreign school in the town of L. The resistance of the Diallobé country had warned him of the risks of the Western adventure.

The ever-living example of his country was there, finally, to prove to him, in his moments of doubt, the reality of a non-Western universe. Adèle did not have her country of the Diallobé. When she happened to discern in herself a feeling or a thought which seemed to her to cut in a certain fashion into the backdrop of the Occident, her reaction for a long time had been to run away from it in terror, as from a monstrosity. Far from any diminution of this ambiguity, it was, on the contrary, accentuated, so that, progressively, Adèle yielded to the conviction that she was in some way abnormal. This evening, in speaking without restraint, as he had done, of what he himself was not far from considering as a shameful monstrosity, Samba Diallo came without knowing it to give a human visage to that part of her which the girl believed to be faceless.

“ADÈLE,” SAMBA DIALLO CALLED.

“Yes.”

“I believe that I hate them.”

She took his arm and made him walk.

The autumn had ripened, and then stripped, the foliage of the trees. A sharp little wind was driving the strollers from the quays. Adèle pushed Samba Diallo toward the cross-walk. They crossed the street and made their way toward a café.

“I don’t hate them as you perhaps think, as your grandfather does, for example. My hatred is more complicated. It is painful. It is from love repressed.”

They went into an almost empty café and took a corner table.

“What would you wish us to serve you?”

The boy was waiting. They ordered two coffees, and remained silent until he came back. Having served them, he went away.

“My hatred is a re-inhibition, if I may use that word, an annulment, of love. I loved them too soon, unwisely, without knowing them well enough. Do you understand? They are of a strange nature. They do not inspire simple sentiments. No one should ally himself with them without having observed them well before-hand.”

“Yes. But they do not leave time for that to the people whom they conquer.”

“Then the people they conquer ought to remain on guard. They ought not to love them. The most poisoned hatreds are those born of old loves. Don’t you hate them?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“I believe that you love them. It seems to me that at the very beginning one cannot not love them, in spite of what they do.”

“Tell me how they conquered you, personally,” she demanded.

She took advantage of the pause to leave the chair she was sitting in and settle herself next to Samba Diallo on the banquette.

“I don’t know any too well. Perhaps it was with their alphabet. With it, they struck the first hard blow at the country of the Diallobé. I remained for a long time under the spell of those signs and those sounds which constitute the structure and the music of their language. When I learned to fit them together to form words, to fit the words together to give birth to speech, my happiness knew no further limit.

“As soon as I knew how to write, I began to flood my father with letters that I wrote to him and delivered to him with my own hand. This was to demonstrate my new knowledge and also, by keeping my gaze fixed on him while he was reading, to establish the fact that with my new tool I should be able to transmit my thought to him without opening my mouth. I had interrupted my studies with the teacher of the Diallobé at the very moment when he was about to initiate me at last into the rational understanding of what up to then I had done no more than
recite—with wonder, to be sure. With these new skills I was suddenly entering, all on one floor, a universe which was, at the very first, one of marvellous comprehension and total communion.…

“As for the teacher of the Diallobé, he had taken his time. Wishing to teach his pupils God, he believed that he had his whole lifetime to do that.

“That is how it is, Adèle. But they—they interposed themselves, and undertook to transform me in their image. Progressively, they brought me out from the heart of things, and accustomed me to live at a distance from the world.”

She snuggled closer against him.

“I hate them,” she said.

Samba Diallo gave a start, and looked at her. She was leaning all the weight of her body against him, and her eyes, half-closed, were fixed on the street.

He was swept through by a strange disturbance. He gently pushed her away and, ceasing to snuggle against him, she raised her face toward his.

“You must not do that, Adèle,” he said.

“Must not do what?”

“You must not hate them.”

“Then you must teach me to penetrate to the heart of the world.”

“I don’t know whether one can ever find that road again, once one has lost it,” he responded, in deep thought.

He felt that she was drawing away from him, and he looked at her. She was weeping, silently, now. He took her hand, but she got up from the banquette.

“I must go home now,” she said.

“I am going with you.”

They left the café, and Samba Diallo hailed a taxi. When he had set Adèle down at her own door he made his way again, on foot, toward the subway.

It was there that, when the train had started, his memory suddenly brought a face before him. He saw it with an intensity that was almost hallucinating: there opposite him, in the yellow light and among the huddled crowd of passengers, had risen up the face of the teacher of the Diallobé. Samba Diallo closed his eyes, but the face never moved. In his thought he called to him:

“Master, what is left for me? The shadows are closing in on me. I no longer burn at the heart of people and things.”

The teacher’s face was unmoving. He was not laughing. He was not angry. He was grave and attentive. Samba Diallo invoked him anew:

“You who have never been distracted from the wisdom of the shadows, you who alone possess the Word, and have a voice sufficiently strong to rally and guide those who are lost, I implore the grace of your outcry in the darkness, the shout of your voice, to revive me to the secret tenderness—”

But the face was gone.

SAMBA DIALLO RECEIVED THE KNIGHT’S LETTER the next day:

“It is my opinion that you should return home. The fact that you will not have brought your studies to the end you would have wished is of little importance.

“It is high time that you should come back, to learn that God is not commensurable with anything, and especially not with history, whose vicissitudes are powerless in relation to His attributes. I know that the Occident, to which I have been so wrong as to send you, has a different faith on that score—a faith of which I recognize the utility, but which we do not share. Between God and man there exists not the slightest consanguinity, nor do I know what historic relationship. If there were, our recriminations would have been admissible. We should have been entitled to harbor resentment against Him for our tragedies, which would manifestly have revealed His imperfections. But this is not the case. God is not our parent. He is entirely outside the stream of flesh, blood, and history which links us together. We are free! See, now, why it seems to me unlawful to found the vindication on history, and senseless to rail against God by reason of our misery.

“These mistakes, nevertheless, whatever might be their intrinsic gravity, would not have troubled me
beyond measure—so generalized are they—if at the same time you had not confessed to a more personal and more profound disquietude. You are afraid that God has abandoned you, because you no longer have the full sense of Him that you had in the past, and, as He has promised to His faithful ones, ‘closer than the carotid artery.’ So, you are not far from considering Him as having betrayed you.

“But you have not stopped to think that the traitor might be yourself. And yet—But answer rather: do you give God the entire place that is due Him, in your thoughts and in your actions? Do you insist upon putting your thoughts in conformity with His law? It is not a matter of paying allegiance to Him once for all, through a general and theoretical profession of faith. It has to do with your making yourself bring
every one
of your thoughts into conformity with the idea you grasp of His order and discipline. Are you doing that?

“I believed that I had talked with you enough about the merits of religious practice. The West, where you are now living, believes that God grants or withholds faith as it pleases Him. I will not debate this point of view, which I share. But I believe also that the omnipotence of God the Creator is such, rightly, that nothing would know how to gainsay it, not even the affirmation of our free determination. Your salvation, the presence of God living in you, depends upon yourself. You will obtain both these if, in mind and body, you rigorously observe His law, which religion has codified.

“But, precisely, it is there, when it is no longer a question of philosophizing, that strong minds stumble pitifully and run aground. And you who, from a vigorous thought, raise yourself to the understanding of God and claim to
take Him in default, do you know only the road of the mosque? You will nail God to the pillory when you will have sought for Him, as He has said, and He will not have come.…”

“MASTER, IT IS THE HOUR OF PRAYER, LET US GO to the mosque,” said the fool, catching hold of Samba Diallo by the chin, as if to force him to look at him.

“No, I am not the master,” Samba Diallo responded. “Don’t you see that I am not the master? The master is dead.”

“Yes, master, let us go to the mosque.”

Samba Diallo made a weary gesture.

“And, besides, I am not going to the mosque. I have already told you not to call me any longer to prayer.”

“Yes, teacher of the Diallobé, you are right. You are tired. They are so tiring, aren’t they? Rest now. When you have rested, we will go to the mosque. Isn’t that so? Tell me, isn’t that so?” he repeated, once more catching hold of Samba Diallo’s chin.

His patience exhausted, Samba Diallo gave him a slight push.

It was enough to make the fool lose his balance, and he fell, rather grotesquely. Samba Diallo was seized by such pity, sweeping all through him, that he dropped to the ground, lifted the fool up, and pressed him to his breast.

The man broke into sobs, extricated himself from Samba Diallo’s embrace, looked at him with eyes full of tears, and said,
“You see, you are the teacher.… You are the teacher of the Diallobé. I am going to the mosque. I shall come back. Wait for me.”

He turned his back and went away, with a light and springing step.

In spite of the frock-coat he was wrapped up in and the voluminous white boubous that he wore under it, one felt that his silhouette had grown less. The neck and the head, which emerged from the mass of his garments, were slender and pinched. From the little fellow’s whole being there emanated a poignant tranquility and melancholy. He disappeared, now, behind the palisade.

For the fool, the teacher of the Diallobé was not dead, although he had been the most constant witness of the old man’s last agonies, two months before.

One morning he had arrived at the house, long silent, of his friend. As he entered the teacher’s room he had seen him praying as the dying pray. He was not rising: seated on his prayer rug, facing the east, he was merely sketching out the movements of the prayer, and had not the strength to complete them. The fool had remained at the door, fascinated by this broken prayer, this incongruous and tragic dumb show. He had waited there until the teacher had finished.

“You see,” his friend, covered with perspiration and gasping, had said to him, “you see the extent to which God has showered His grace upon me. He has given me to live until the hour—of praying in this fashion—which He had foreseen from all eternity and set in His code.… You see—I have the strength. Look—Oh, look!”

And the teacher had recommenced his crippled prayer.

The fool had dashed outside and had run, without
stopping, as far as the chief’s house. He had found him in audience, and had stepped over the men seated there in quest of justice.

“I believe,” he said, breathlessly, “that the teacher’s hour has come.”

The chief had bent his head and, slowly, pronounced the
chahâda
before getting up.

The fool, meanwhile, had gone away again. In the teacher’s room he had found his family, together with Demba. Making his way through the company to the side of his friend, who lay stretched out on a mat, he had half lifted him and supported him against his breast. His tears were falling slowly on the perspiring face of the dying man.

“You see, He is there, my Friend is there,” the weak voice was murmuring. “I well know that it was the great clamor of my life which hid Thee from me, Oh, my Creator. Now that the day is sinking, I see Thee. Thou art there.”