Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (6 page)

"Don't you think that's better?" A . . . asks, turning toward him.

"Certainly more
intime "
Franck answers.

He drinks his soup in rapid spoonfuls. Although he makes no excessive gestures, although he holds his spoon quite properly and swallows the liquid without making any noise, he seems to display, in this modest task, a disproportionate energy and zest. It would be difficult to specify exactly in what way he is neglecting some essential rule, at what particular point he is lacking in discretion.

Avoiding any notable defect, his behavior, nevertheless, does not pass unnoticed. And, by contrast, it accentuates the fact that A . . . has just completed the same operation without having seemed to move—but without attracting any attention, on the other hand, by an abnormal immobility. It takes a glance at her empty though stained plate to discover that she has not neglected to serve herself.

Memory succeeds, moreover, in reconstituting several movements of her right hand and her lips, several comings and goings of the spoon between the plate and her mouth, which might be considered as significant.

To be still more certain, it is enough to ask her if she doesn't think the cook has made the soup too salty.

"Oh no," she answers, "you have to eat salt so as not to sweat."

Which, on reflection, does not prove beyond a doubt that she tasted the soup today.

Now the boy clears away the plates. It then becomes impossible to check again the stains in A . . ,'s plate—or their absence, if she has not served herself.

The conversation has returned to the story of the engine trouble: in the future Franck will not buy any more old military matériel; his latest acquisitions have given him too many problems; the next time he replaces one of his vehicles, it will be with a new one.

But he is wrong to trust modern trucks to the Negro drivers, who will wreck them just as fast, if not faster.

"All the same," Franck says, "if the motor is new, the driver will not have to fool with it."

Yet he should know that just the opposite is true: the new motor will be all the more attractive a toy, and what with speeding on bad roads and acrobatics behind the wheel . . .

On the strength of his three years' experience, Franck believes there are good drivers, even among the Negroes here. A ... is also of this opinion, of course.

She has kept out of the discussion about the comparative quality of the machines, but the question of the drivers provokes a rather long and categorical intervention on her part.

Besides, she might be right. In that case, Franck would have to be right too.

Both are now talking about the novel A. . . is reading, whose action takes place in Africa. The heroine cannot bear the tropical climate (like Christiane). The heat actually seems to give her terrible attacks:

"It's all mental, things like that," Franck says. He then makes a reference, obscure for anyone who has not even leafed through the book, to the husband's behavior. His sentence ends with "take apart" or "take a part," without its being possible to be sure who or what is meant. Franck looks at A. . ., who is looking at Franck. She gives him a quick smile that is quickly absorbed in the shadows. She has understood, since she knows the story.

No, her features have not moved. Their immobility is not so recent: the lips have remained set since her last words. The fugitive smile must have been a reflection of the lamp, or the shadow of a moth.

Besides, she was no longer facing Franck at that moment. She had just moved her head back and was looking straight ahead of her down the table, toward the bare wall where a blackish spot marks the place where a centipede was squashed last week, at the beginning of the month, perhaps the month before, or later.

Franck's face, with the light almost directly behind it, does not reveal the slightest expression.

The boy comes in to clear away the plates. A. . . asks him, as usual, to serve the coffee on the veranda.

Here the darkness is complete. No one talks any more. The sound of the crickets has stopped. Only the shrill cry of some nocturnal carnivore can be heard from time to time, and the sudden drone of a beetle, the clink of a little porcelain cup being set on the low table.

Franck and A . . . have sat down in their same two chairs, backs against the wooden wall of the house. It is once again the chair with the metal frame which has remained unoccupied. The position of the fourth chair is still less justified, now that there is no view over the valley. (Even before dinner, during the brief twilight, the apertures of the balustrade were too narrow to permit a real view of the landscape; and above the hand-rail nothing but sky could be seen.)

The wood of the balustrade is smooth to the touch, when the fingers follow the direction of the grain and the tiny longitudinal cracks. A scaly zone comes next; then there is another smooth surface, but this time without lines of orientation and stippled here and there with slight roughnesses in the paint.

In broad daylight, the contrast of the two shades of gray—that of the naked wood and that, somewhat lighter, of the remaining paint—creates complicated figures with angular, almost serrated outlines. On the top of the handrail, there are only scattered, protruding islands formed by the last vestiges of paint. On the balusters, though, it is the unpainted areas, much smaller and generally located toward the middle of the uprights, which constitute the spots, here incised, where the fingers recognize the vertical grain of the wood. At the edge of the patches, new scales of the paint are easy to chip off; it is enough to slip a fingernail beneath the projecting edge and pry it up by bending the first joint of the finger; the resistance is scarcely perceptible.

On the other side of the veranda, once the eye is accustomed to the darkness, a paler form can be seen outlined against the wall of the house: Franck's white shirt. His forearms are lying on the elbow-rests. The upper part of his body is leaning back in the chair.

A ... is humming a dance tune whose words remain unintelligible. But perhaps Franck understands them, if he already knows them, from having heard them often, perhaps with her. Perhaps it is one of her favorite records.

A .. .'s arms, a little less distinct than her neighbor's because of the color—though light—of the material of her dress, are also lying on the elbow-rests of her chair. The four hands are lying in a row, motionless. The space between A .. .'s left hand and Franck's right hand is approximately two inches. The shrill cry of some nocturnal carnivore, sharp and short, echoes again toward the bottom of the valley, at an unspecifiable distance.

"I think I'll be getting along," Franck says.

"Oh don't go," A . . . replies at once, "it's not late at all. It's so pleasant sitting out here."

If Franck wanted to leave, he would have a good excuse: his wife and child who are alone in the house. But he mentions only the hour he must get up the next morning, without making any reference to Christiane. The same shrill, short cry, which sounds closer, now seems to come from the garden, quite near the foot of the veranda on the east side.

As if echoing it, a similar cry follows, coming from the opposite direction. Others answer these, from higher up, toward the road; then still others, from the low ground.

Sometimes the sound is a little lower, or more prolonged. There are probably different kinds of animals. Still, all these cries are alike; not that their common characteristic is easy to decide, but rather their common lack of characteristics: they do not seem to be cries of fright, or pain, or intimidation, or even love. They sound like mechanical cries, uttered without perceptible motive, expressing nothing, indicating only the existence, the position, and the respective movements of each animal, whose trajectory through the night they punctuate.

"All the same," Franck says, "I think I'll be getting along."

A . . . does not reply. Neither one has moved. They are sitting side by side, leaning back in their chairs, arms lying on the elbow-rests, their four hands in similar positions, at the same level, lined up parallel to the wall of the house.

Now the shadow of the southwest column—at the corner of the veranda on the bedroom side—falls across the garden. The sun, still low in the eastern sky, rakes the valley from the side. The rows of banana trees, growing at an angle to the direction of the valley, are everywhere quite distinct in this light.

From the bottom to the upper edge of the highest sectors, on the hillside facing the one the house is built on, it is relatively easy to count the trees; particularly opposite the house, thanks to the recent plantings of the patches located in this area.

The valley has been cleared over the greater part of its width here: there remains, at present, nothing but a border of brush (some thirty yards across at the top of the plateau) which joins the valley by a knoll with neither crest nor rocky fall.

The line of separation between the uncultivated zone and the banana plantation is not entirely straight. It is a zigzag line, with alternately protruding and receding angles, each belonging to a different patch of different age, but of a generally identical orientation.

Just opposite the house, a clump of trees marks the highest point the cultivation reaches in this sector. The patch that ends here is a rectangle. The ground is invisible, or virtually so, between the fronds. Still, the impeccable alignment of the boles shows that they have been planted only recently and that no stems have as yet been cut.

Starting from this clump of trees, the patch runs downhill with a slight divergence (toward the left) from the greatest angle of slope. There are thirty-two banana trees in the row, down to the lower edge of the patch.

Prolonging this patch toward the bottom, with the same arrangement of rows, another patch occupies the space included between the first patch and the little stream that flows through the valley bottom. This second patch is twenty-three trees deep, and only its more advanced vegetation distinguishes it from the preceding patch: the greater height of the trunks, the tangle of fronds, and the number of well-formed stems. Besides, some stems have already been cut. But the empty place where the bole has been cut is then as easily discernible as the tree itself would be with its tuft of wide, pale-green leaves, out of which comes the thick curving stem bearing the fruit.

Furthermore, instead of being rectangular like the one above it, this patch is trapezoidal; for the stream bank that constitutes its lower edge is not perpendicular to its two sides—running up the slope—which are parallel to each other. The row on the right side has no more than thirteen banana trees instead of twenty-three.

And finally, the lower edge of this patch is not straight, since the little stream is not: a slight bulge narrows the patch toward the middle of its width. The central row, which should have eighteen trees if it were to be a true trapezoid, has, in fact, only sixteen.

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarcely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty-three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty- two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row).

These numbers themselves are theoretical, since certain banana trees have already been cut at ground level, once the stem has matured. There are actually nineteen tufts of leaves and two empty spaces which constitute the fourth row; and in the fifth, twenty tufts and one space—that is, from bottom to top: eight tufts of leaves, an empty space, twelve tufts of leaves.

Without bothering with the order in which the actually visible banana trees and the cut banana trees occur, the sixth row gives the following numbers: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen—which represent respectively the rectangle, the true trapezoid, the trapezoid with a curved edge, and the same after subtracting the boles cut for the harvest.

And for the following rows: twenty-three, twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one. Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, twenty. Twenty-three, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, etc....

On the log bridge that crosses the stream at the bottom edge of this patch, there is a man crouching: a native, wearing blue trousers and a colorless undershirt that leaves his shoulders bare. He is leaning toward the liquid surface, as if he were trying to see something at the bottom, which is scarcely possible, the water never being transparent enough despite its extreme shallowness.

On the near slope of the valley, a single patch runs uphill from the stream to the garden. Despite the rather slight declivity the slope appears to have, the banana trees are still easy to count here from the height of the veranda. As a matter of fact, the trees are very young in this zone, which has only recently been replanted. Not only is the regularity of the planting perfect here, but the trunks are no more than a foot and a half high, and the tufts of leaves that terminate them are still quite far apart from each other. Finally, the angle of the rows with the direction of the valley (about forty-five degrees) also favors their enumeration.

An oblique row begins at the log bridge, at the right, and reaches the left corner of the garden. It includes the thirty-six trees in its length. The alternate arrangement makes it possible to consider these same trees as being aligned in three other directions: first of all, the perpendicular to the first direction mentioned, then two others, also perpendicular to each other, and forming angles of forty-five degrees with the first two. These last two rows are therefore respectively parallel and perpendicular to the direction of the valley—and to the lower edge of the garden.