A Way in the World (19 page)

It was cruel and unfair. The students of the university here—a new university, with landscaped grounds and paved roads and red-brick halls of residence: most of the students the first in their families to get higher education, and all with government grants—the students here couldn’t possibly imagine the discouragements Lebrun had had to live through in the world outside.

And it was strange that Phyllis, in spite of her own history, her unhappy African marriage, her blank life in Africa, her dependence on expatriates for society, should have taken
the African side in this judgement of Lebrun. But that was her way. She didn’t like it when visitors were at all supercilious about Africa; she liked it much less when the visitors were black, from the United States or the West Indies. It was as though she wished to make it clear that she was standing by her decision to come out to Africa.

One day I asked her about her marriage.

She said, “I used to go to this club in Paris. It was for blacks. A cellar, really. And there was this ugly little African fellow. And I mean little. He was small and black and soft, with a lot of gold. Gold watch, gold rings, gold pen. The gold used to reflect on his skin. He courted me hard. He said he loved my name, Phyllis. And my voice. Then he began to ask me to marry him. He said his family was very rich. They were like chiefs, he said. They had lots of land, lots of servants, lots of slaves.”

I said, “He said that about the slaves?”

“I thought he was lying. But I didn’t mind. I liked him for it, in fact. I thought he was just trying very hard to impress me, and I liked him for trying. This went on for some time. And then I agreed to marry him. Do you want to know why? Will you believe me? I agreed because I didn’t like him, because I found him repulsive, in fact. That ugly face and that soft body and that very smooth skin reflecting the gold. I thought it would be good for me, to marry a man I couldn’t possibly love. I felt I was making a deal with God, giving up love and pleasure. I felt I couldn’t go wrong. I used to talk to myself in my room. I used to say, ‘Phyllis, you have to forget about love and beauty. You have to forget your old ways. They haven’t got you anywhere, my girl. They have just got you to this room in Paris. You have to think about your life and future. That is where true happiness lies.’

“So I went to my little chief and said yes, and tried to find happiness in his happiness. The days afterwards in Paris
were the best. I felt I had done the right thing, made my deal with God. And I was courted more than ever. After some months, when my little chief had finished his studies, we came out to Africa. And there it all crashed. He hadn’t told his family about his marriage, and they ignored me. Literally. They didn’t talk to me. They even in my presence began to talk to him about the need for him to get married.”

I said to Phyllis, “But how could you go so calmly to that country? Surely you knew it was a tyranny?”

“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe what I read in the papers. I felt they were lying. I thought there was another truth. You see the way we can tie ourselves up. And I was more concerned with my own adventure. I was nervous, you know. I was more frightened of Africa than any European woman would have been. I have known European women who have married Africans. It’s different for them. There’s the element of pleasure, excitement, even vanity. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and that’s that. For me it was different. I had staked too much on it. I had talked too much to myself.”

“Did you feel protected by your little chief?”

“In the beginning. He took me around everywhere with him. And he didn’t exaggerate. They had a lot of land, and they had a lot of servants and slaves. You didn’t buy the slaves. They were just there in the villages, certain groups, certain families. They were there to look after the other people. Everybody knew about them, so there was no question of them running away.

“Something happened not long after we arrived. We went to my little chief’s village. There was some ceremony of welcome, and at the end the little chief’s feet were washed in blood. Let me tell you about my feelings. I was excited and proud. I loved the ritual. I felt it was very old. I felt it came from the beginning of time. It wasn’t how I had thought of Africa when I was in Guadeloupe. I felt these rituals gave me a place in the world.

“Later I heard that a few days before that ceremony a child had been kidnapped from one of the slave villages. I put two and two together. You normally use animal blood in that foot-washing ritual, but the highest honour, the one that does most good to everybody, is when you do it with human blood. So look at that. Look at how far I had gone, so quickly. I was stunned, of course. But it didn’t do away with my feeling for the beauty of the ritual. My little chief had tried to impress me with his money. But it was the ritual side of his chief’s life that became more and more important to me.

“It was important to my little chief too. As he fell back into his old ways, he thought less of the beauty of my name, Phyllis, and of the beauty of my Guadeloupe French accent. The time came when he wanted to be rid of me. He wanted to do what his family wanted him to do, to marry a suitable woman of his tribe. He began to be violent, the little chief. He began to beat me, the soft little fellow with the gold. I remembered the foot-washing ceremony. And I didn’t have to be told now that I was in a country without law. The day actually came—it was as though someone were working magic on me—when I felt that if I stayed one more night in the country I would go mad. That was when I went to the airport and took a plane here. And to think that when I went against all my instincts and married him I thought I was making a deal with God.

“He’s very much on my mind now, if you want to know. I’ll tell you about something that happened about a month before you came here. The telephone rang very early one morning. In fact, when I woke up it felt like the middle of the night. It was a man’s voice on the phone, a French voice. The line wasn’t good. I thought it was a nuisance call. It does happen here. The voices are usually French. It makes me feel far from home, and very alone.

“I should have put the phone down right away, but luckily I didn’t. The call was from the police in Santos Dumont,
and not from a man giving a bogus name. Santos-Dumont was an early aviator, and the French gave the name to a frontier post they established in the north. There are a certain number of French officers in the police here, and you have seen the French army barracks just outside the town.

“The officer spoke to me as though I was a member of the embassy, rather than a locally employed secretary. I didn’t put him right. He was very polite; I didn’t want to spoil that. He said he had with him in the police station someone from across the frontier. He gave the name of the little chief. He put him on the telephone. It was the little chief all right. His voice was squeaky with terror. He said things had gone very badly on the other side of the frontier. The president there had suddenly turned against him and all the rest of the
cheferie.
Somebody had told him the day before that he was to be arrested in the morning. He decided to run. He had been driving since the previous afternoon.

“ ‘Thank God for the Mercedes,’ he said, as though we were still together, and I still used the Mercedes. He had driven for hours on bad roads and dusty tracks and the car hadn’t broken down. In the middle of all of his trouble he was still proud of his car.

“He wasn’t absolutely out of danger. He could have been handed back. You know that over the frontier they are very Maoist and anti-French, and they don’t lose a chance of making propaganda in other African countries against the government here. However, I spoke to our ambassador, and he made a few telephone calls. He knew my story. The embassy more or less took the little chief under their protection. I drove up that afternoon to Santos Dumont with someone from the embassy to pick up the little chief.

“He was staying in a police building in a sealed room with an air-conditioning unit. It was very cold in the room. He was in a dirty peasant’s cloth and without his gold. Nothing shining on his skin. It was his idea of a disguise. The terror was still in his eyes.

“ ‘Me, me,’ he kept on saying. ‘A man of the
cheferie—
they were going to put me on the
diète noire.’
You know about that famous black diet, don’t you? They put you in a cell without food or water and leave you to die. It’s what the president does to his enemies. I had heard about it when I was there. But I will tell you that it was another one of the things I heard about and didn’t believe in. I saw now, for the first time, that my little chief had always known about it. And I was shocked by that.

“Through the sealed window you could see the flat, hot countryside. Very strange. The trees, even when they were far away, didn’t bunch together. They were just standing one by one, like poles. The dust was like mist. It was the famous desertification people came to see and write reports about. It was what he had been driving through all night, and the Mercedes hadn’t broken down.

“He never asked me about myself. He never asked me how I had come to the strange country myself, or got my job or how I’d managed all these years. He never thanked me for taking his telephone call or arranging his asylum or driving down to see him. He expected me to treat him well. He was a chief, you see. He was full of his own sufferings and betrayal and his bravery in doing the long night drive. All the way up to the capital he complained like a child. He said his family had always supported the president. They had sent him to school and looked after him and his family. They had stood by him when the president had kicked out the French and there had been all that trouble. And then the president’s mind had been poisoned against the
cheferie.
Everyone knew who had done that. It was Lebrun, the
antillais.
Lebrun had bewitched the president. He had flattered him and turned his head. It was Lebrun, Lebrun—the little chief was obsessed with him.”

I had heard many things about Lebrun’s trip to French West Africa. But I hadn’t heard before that he had had any local political influence.

Phyllis said, “It is what people say. He was very angry when he left here, and I suppose when he went across the border they would have received him with open arms. They did a lot of anti-French propaganda with him.”

I said to Phyllis, “You said the little chief was on your mind.”

“With the help of the embassy we’ve been getting some of his money out from the country. We’ve arranged his papers, and he’s getting restless now. He’s forgotten some of his terror. He is talking of going to Paris. He’s got a lot of money there. And these past few days I’ve been thinking, ‘Yes, he’ll go to Paris now, and he’ll pick up some other woman and dazzle her with his chief’s talk and it’ll begin all over again.’ ”

THE TIME
came for me to move on. The next stage of my journey was the dictatorship next door. This was the country Phyllis had come out to, the country that had kicked the French out, with all their aid and
coopérants,
and had, as some people said, gone back to bush.

So, without premeditation, I was following in the footsteps of Lebrun. Phyllis had names for me in the other country. There was someone there she especially wanted me to meet. This person, she said, would give me an idea of the true Africa, the Africa that the newspapers didn’t write about.

The day before I left she came to the hotel to say goodbye. We sat out on the terrace. A tourist feature had been made of the lagoon, which in the old days was famous for its mosquitoes and disease.

She said things she had said often before, about Africa, about the false ideas brought by black people from the West Indies and the United States. She was killing time, I could see. And then, just before she left, she did what she had come to do: she opened her handbag and gave me an envelope with
banknotes. The money was for the man she wanted me to see. Life was hard for people over there, she said.

It was a roundabout journey. Political stresses had made a direct flight between the two neighbouring countries impossible. A plane to a neutral country to the north; a breakdown, a long wait at night in an open shed at the edge of an airfield, local police lounging with the passengers; traders in dingy gowns sitting on sacks of cheap rubber shoes and other goods; and then the shaky final trip to the dictatorship.

There were many policemen at the airport. It wasn’t a busy place. The arrival of this small plane was the big event of the morning, and the eyes of the idle officials glittered at the thought of the money to be made from the few people who had come in. It was a shed of an airport hall, with old, blown-up photographs of what must have been local scenes, relic of an earlier time of tourist promotion. I would have had trouble getting Phyllis’s money for her friend through—everything had to be declared, and some people were searched by customs officers trembling with excitement. But the man in front of me was detained so long—he was even taken off at one stage to a cubicle—that I was waved through by a senior officer anxious to close down the desks for the morning and go home.

The climate was similar to the climate of the other place. But, strangely, the light and heat that were part of the life and excitement and crowd of the other place here felt, right away, like tropical or African torpor. The newish airport highway, unmaintained, and cracked in many places, ran through bare red earth. No villages were to be seen, only big boards with sayings of the president’s, and large signs, facing the highway, as though they were meant only for visitors: INCREASE PRODUCTION.

It was strange to think of Lebrun coming here with his daughter; and, in extreme old age, after having gone back on so many of his old views, being received with honour,
and finding a kind of revolutionary fulfilment. INCREASE PRODUCTION—it was like coming across a little bit of the raw material, part of the facts and figures and tables, of one of Lebrun’s old communist articles, in which this kind of “production” was better than the other sort of wealth.