Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (10 page)

Yet Franck can't be unused to makeshift repairs, since his truck is always having engine trouble . . .

"Yes," he says, "I'm beginning to know
that
motor pretty well. But the car hasn't given me trouble very often."

As a matter of fact, there has never been another incident with the big blue sedan, which is almost new, moreover.

"There has to be a first time for everything," Franck answers. Then, after a pause: "It was just my unlucky day . .."

A little gesture of his right hand—rising, then falling more slowly—has just come to an end on the strip of leather that constitutes the arm of the chair. Franck's face is drawn; his smile has not reappeared since the grimace of a few minutes ago. His body seems to be stuck to the chair.

"Unlucky, maybe, but it wasn't a tragedy," A... replies, in a casual tone that contrasts with that of her companion. "If we had been able to telephone, the delay wouldn't have mattered at all; but with these plantations isolated in the jungle, what could we do? In any case, it's better than being stuck on the road in the middle of the night!"

It's better than having an accident too. It was only a piece of bad luck, without consequences, an incident of no seriousness, one of the minor inconveniences of colonial life. "I think I'll be getting along," Franck says. He has just stopped here to drop A ... off on his way home. He doesn't want to waste any more time. Christiane must be wondering what's become of him, and Franck is eager to reassure her. He stands up with sudden energy and sets down on the low table the glass he has emptied at one gulp.

"Till next time," A . . . says, without leaving her own chair, "and thank you."

Franck makes a vague gesture with his arm, a conventional protest. A ... insists:

"No, really! I've been on your neck for two days."

"Not at all. I'm terribly sorry to have given you a night like that in that miserable hotel."

He has taken two steps, he stops before turning down the hallway that crosses the house, he half turns around: "And please forgive me for being such a bad mechanic." The same grimace, faster now, slides across his face. He disappears into the house.

His steps echo over the tiles of the hallway. He had leather-soled shoes on today, and a white suit that has been wrinkled by the trip.

When the door at the other end of the house has opened and closed again, A ... gets up too and leaves the veranda by the same door. But she goes to her bedroom at once, closing and locking the door behind her, making the latch click loudly. In the courtyard, in front of the northern façade of the house, the sound of a motor starting up is immediately followed by the shrill protest of gears forced to make too fast a getaway. Franck has not said what kind of repairs his car had needed.

A . . . closes the windows of her bedroom which have stayed wide open all morning, lowering the blinds one after the other. She is going to change; and take a shower, probably, after the long dusty road.

The bathroom opens off the bedroom. A second door opens onto the hallway; the bolt is closed from inside, with a swift gesture that makes a loud click.

The next room, still on the same side of the hallway, is a bedroom, much smaller than A . . .'s, which contains a single bed. Six feet further, the hallway ends at the dining room.

The table is set for one person. A . . .'s place will have to be added.

On the bare wall, the traces of the squashed centipede are still perfectly visible. Nothing has been done to clean off the stain, for fear of spoiling the handsome, dull finish, probably not washable.

The table is set for three, according to the usual arrangement. . . . Franck and A . . ., sitting in their usual places, are talking about the trip to town they intend to make together during the following week, she for various shopping errands, he to find out about a new truck he wants to buy.

They have already settled the time for their departure, as well as for their return, calculated the approximate duration of the time on the road in each direction, estimated the time they will have for their affairs, including lunch and dinner, in town. They have not specified whether they will take their meals separately or if they will meet to have them together. But the question hardly comes up, since only one restaurant serves decent meals to travelers passing through town. It is only natural that they will meet there, especially for dinner, since they must start back immediately afterwards.

It is also natural that A . . . would want to take advantage of this present opportunity to get to town, which she prefers to the solution of a banana truck, virtually impracticable on such a long road, and that she should furthermore prefer Franck's company to that of some native driver, no matter how great the mechanical ability she attributes to the latter. As for the other occasions which permit her to make the trip under acceptable circumstances, they are incontestably rather infrequent, even exceptional, if not nonexistent, unless there are serious reasons to justify a categorical insistence on her part, which always more or less upsets the proper functioning of the plantation.

This time, she has asked for nothing, nor indicated the precise nature of the purchases which motivated her expedition. There was no special reason to give, once a friend's car was available to pick her up at home and bring her back the same night. The most surprising thing of all, upon consideration, is that such an arrangement should not already have been made, one day or another.

Franck has been eating without speaking for several minutes. It is A . . whose plate is empty, her fork and knife laid across it side by side, who resumes the conversation, asking after Christiane whom fatigue (due to the heat, she thinks) has kept from coming with her husband on several occasions recently.

"It's always the same," Franck answers. "I've asked her to come down to the port with us, for a change of scene. But she didn't want to, on account of the child."

"Not to mention," A . . . says, "that it's much hotter down on the coast."

"More humid, yes," Franck agrees.

Then five or six remarks are exchanged as to the respective doses of quinine necessary down on the coast and up here. Franck returns to the ill effects quinine produces on the heroine of the African novel they are reading. The conversation is thus led to the central events of the story in question.

On the other side of the closed window, in the dusty courtyard whose rough gravel gathers into heaps, the truck has its hood turned toward the house. With the exception of this detail, it is parked precisely in the spot intended for it: that is, it is framed between the lower and middle panes of the right-hand window-leaf, against the inner jamb, the little crosspiece cutting its outline horizontally into two masses of equal size.

Through the open pantry door, A . . . comes into the dining room toward the table where the meal has been served. She has come around by the veranda, in order to speak to the cook, whose voluble, singsong voice rose just a moment ago, in the kitchen.

A ... has changed her clothes after taking a shower. She has put on the light-colored, close-fitting dress Christiane says is unsuitable for a tropical climate. She is going to sit down at her place, her back to the window, before the setting the boy has added for her. She unfolds her napkin on her knees and begins to help herself, her left hand raising the cover of the still warm platter that has already been served while she was in the bathroom but still remains in the middle of the table.

She says: "The trip made me hungry."

Then she asks about the incidents occurring on the plantation during her absence. The expression she uses ("What's new?") is spoken in a light tone whose animation indicates no particular attention. Besides, there is nothing new.

Yet A . . . seems to have an unusual desire to talk. She feels—she says—that a lot of things must have happened during this period of time which, for her part, was busily filled.

On the plantation too this time has been well employed; but only by the usual series of activities, which are always the same, for the most part.

She herself, questioned as to her news, limits her remarks to four or five pieces of information already known: the road is still being repaired for five or six miles after the first village, the "Cap Saint-Jean" was in the harbor waiting for its cargo, the work on the new post office has not advanced much in the last three months, the municipal road service is still unsatisfactory, etc. . . .

She helps herself again. It would be better to put the truck in the shed, since no one is to use it at the beginning of the afternoon. The thick glass of the window nicks the body of the truck with a deep, rounded scallop behind the front wheel. Somewhat farther down, isolated from the principal mass by a strip of gravel, a half-circle of painted metal is refracted more than a foot and a half from its real location. This aberrant piece can also be moved about as the observer pleases, changing its shape as well as its dimensions: it swells from right to left, shrinks in the opposite direction, becomes a crescent toward the bottom, a complete circle as it moves upward, or else acquires a fringe (but this is a very limited, almost instantaneous position) of two concentric aureoles. Finally, with larger shifts, it melts into the main surface or disappears, with a sudden contraction.

A . . . tries talking a little more. She nevertheless does not describe the room where she spent the night, an uninteresting subject, she says, turning away her head: everyone knows that hotel, its discomfort and its patched mosquito-netting.

It is at this moment that she notices the Scutigera on the bare wall in front of her. In an even tone of voice, as if in order not to frighten the creature, she says:

"A centipede!"

Franck looks up again. Following the direction of A .. ,'s motionless gaze, he turns his head to the other side.

The animal is motionless in the center of the panel, easily seen against the light-colored paint, despite the dim light. Franck, who has said nothing, looks at A . . . again.

Then he stands up, noiselessly. A . . . moves no more than the centipede while Franck approaches the wall, his napkin wadded up in his hand.

The hand with tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white cloth.

Franck lifts the napkin away from the wall and with his foot continues to squash something on the tiles, against the baseboard. And he sits down in his place again, to the right of the lamp lit behind him, on the sideboard.

When he passes in front of the lamp, his shadow swept over the table top, which it covered entirely for an instant. Then the boy comes in through the open door; he begins to clear the table in silence. A . . . asks him to serve the coffee on the veranda, as usual.

She and Franck, sitting in their chairs, continue a desultory discussion of which day would be most convenient for this little trip to town they have been planning since the evening before.

The subject is soon exhausted. Its interest does not diminish, but they find no new element to nourish it. The sentences become shorter and limit themselves, for the most part, to repeating fragments of those spoken during these last two days, or even before.

After some final monosyllables, separated by increasingly longer pauses and ultimately no longer intelligible, they let the night triumph altogether.

Vague shapes indicated by the less intense obscurity of a light-colored dress or shirt, they are sitting side by side, leaning back in their chairs, arms resting on the elbow-rests, occasionally making vague movements of small extent, no sooner moving from these original positions than returning to them, or perhaps not moving at all.

The crickets too have fallen silent.

There is only the shrill cry of some nocturnal carnivore to be heard from time to time, and the sudden buzzing of a beetle, the clink of a little porcelain cup being set on the low table.

Now the voice of the second driver reaches this central section of the veranda, coming from the direction of the sheds; it is singing a native tune, with incomprehensible words, or even without words.

The sheds are located on the other side of the house, to the right of the large courtyard. The voice must therefore come around the corner occupied by the office and beneath the overhanging roof, which noticeably muffles it, though some sound can cross the room itself through the blinds (on the south façade and the east gable-end).

But it is a voice that carries well, full and strong, though in a rather low register. It is flexible too, flowing easily from one note to another, then suddenly breaking off.

Because of the peculiar nature of this kind of melody, it is difficult to determine if the song is interrupted for some fortuitous reason—in relation, for instance, to the manual work the singer is performing at the same time—or whether the tune has come to its natural conclusion.

Similarly, when it begins again, it is just as sudden, as abrupt, starting on notes which hardly seem to constitute a beginning, or a reprise.

At other places, however, something seems about to end; everything indicates this: a gradual cadence, tranquillity regained, the feeling that nothing remains to be said; but after the note which should be the last comes another one, without the least break in continuity, with the same ease, then another, and others following, and the hearer supposes himself transported into the heart of the poem . . . when at that point everything stops without warning.

A ..., in the bedroom, again bends over the letter she is writing. The sheet of pale blue paper in front of her has only a few lines on it at this point; A ... adds three or four more words, rather hastily, and holds her pen in the air above the paper. After a moment she raises her head again while the song resumes, from the direction of the sheds.

It is doubtless the same poem continuing. If the themes sometimes blur, they only recur somewhat later, all the more clearly, virtually identical. Yet these repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications—though barely perceptible—eventually moving quite far from the point of departure.