Journey to the End of the Night (15 page)

"Africa it is," I said, and let myself be steered to the tropics where, I was told, you were sure to get ahead fast, provided you behaved and were reasonably temperate. Those prognostics gave me food for thought. There wasn't much to be said for me, but my manners were all right, and I was self-effacing; deference came easy to me, I lived in constant fear of not being on time, but took good care never to get ahead of anybody. In short, I had delicacy.

After all, if you manage to escape alive from an international slaughterhouse run rampant, it's a sign of tact and discretion. But let's get back to our trip. It looked fairly promising as long as we were in European waters. In small, adenoidal, mutually suspicious groups, the passengers lolled and lounged in the shade between decks, in the toilets and in the smoking room. From morning to night they steeped themselves in Picon and gossip. They belched, they dozed, they shouted, and never expressed the least regret for anything they had left behind in Europe.

Our ship's name was the
Admiral Bragueton
.[38] If it kept afloat on those tepid seas, it was only thanks to its paint. Any number of coats laid on, layer after layer, had given the
Admiral Bragueton
a kind of second hull, something like an onion. We were heading for Africa, the real, grandiose Africa of impenetrable forests, fetid swamps, inviolate wildernesses, where black tyrants wallowed in sloth and cruelty on the banks of neverending rivers. I would barter a pack of "Pilett"[39] razor blades for big long elephant's tusks, gaudy-colored birds, and juvenile slaves. Guaranteed. That would be life! Nothing in common with the emasculated Africa of travel agencies and monuments, of railways and candy bars. Certainly not! We'd be seeing Africa in the raw, the real Africa! We the boozing passengers of the
Admiral Bragueton
.

But as soon as we'd passed the coast of Portugal, things started going bad. One morning we woke up in the midst of a steam bath, pervasive and alarming. The water in our glasses, the sea, the air, our sheets, our sweat, everything was hot, sultry. From then on, by night and day, it was impossible to have anything cool in your hands, under your ass, or in your throat, except the ice from the bar in your whisky. A dull despair descended on the passengers of the
Admiral Bragueton
, condemned to sitting permanently in the bar, held fast by little pieces of ice, exchanging threats and incoherent apologies after their card games.

It didn't take long. In that despondent changeless heat the entire human content of the ship congealed into massive drunkenness. People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under gray, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the frantic unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds. Once we had passed Portugal, everybody on board started unleashing his instincts, ferociously; alcohol helped and so did the blissful feeling conferred, especially on soldiers and civil servants, by the knowledge that the trip was absolutely free of charge. The knowledge that for four consecutive weeks their bed, board, and liquor won't cost a thing is in itself enough to make most people delirious with thrift. Consequently, when it became known that, alone of all the ship's passengers, I had paid my own fare, I was looked upon as a shameless and intolerable swine.

If on leaving Marseille I had had some experience of colonial society, I would have gone down on my knees and begged the pardon and indulgence of the colonial infantry officer I kept running into, the highest in rank of those on board, for my un-worthiness, and perhaps, for safety's sake, I'd also have humbled myself before the senior civil servant. Then those phan-tasmagorical passengers might have tolerated my presence in their midst and nothing would have happened. But I was ignorant, and my foolhardiness in supposing that I was entitled to breathe the same air as they almost cost me my life. One can never be too anxious. Thanks to a certain ingenuity, I lost nothing but what selfrespect I had left. This is what happened. Some time after the Canary Islands, I learned from one of the stewards that my fellow passengers, by common accord, thought me affected, not to say insolent ... that they suspected me of being a pimp and a pederast ... something of a cocaine addict on the side ... but only on the side ... Then the suspicion made its way around that I must have left France to escape the consequences of certain heinous crimes. But I was only at the beginning of my troubles. At that point I learned that on this line it was customary to view paying passengers with extreme caution, accompanied by persecution; I'm speaking of those who were not traveling free, either on military transportation orders or on the basis of some bureaucratic arrangement, for as everyone knows, the colonies belong to the upper reaches of the administration. After all there are few plausible reasons for an unknown civilian to venture into those parts ... A spy, a suspicious character ... they found a thousand reasons for giving me sinister looks, the officers straight in the eye, the ladies with a knowing smile. After a while, even the deck hands and stewards, encouraged by the passengers, took to exchanging heavily caustic remarks behind my back. In the end no one doubted that I was the biggest and most intolerable, in fact the only out and out blackguard on board. A promising outlook.

My neighbors at table were four toothless and bilious postal officials from Gabon. They had been friendly to me, chummy in fact at the start of the voyage; now they never said a word to me. They had tacitly agreed that I was a man to be watched. I seldom left my cabin, and then only with infinite precautions. The air was so hot it weighed on our skins like a solid. Behind my bolted door I lay naked, trying to imagine what plan those diabolical passengers had cooked up to destroy me. I didn't know anyone on board, yet they all seemed to know me. An exact description of me must have taken instant form in their minds, like that of a famous criminal published in the newspapers.

Through no fault of mine, I had been cast in the indispensable role of the "foul and loathsome villain," shame of the human race, whose presence has been recorded down through the centuries, who is as well known to everyone as God and the Devil, but who during his passage on this earth is so polymorphous and evasive as to elude everyone's grasp. For this "villain" to be at last isolated, identified, and cornered, exceptional circumstances had been needed, such as were to be met with only in the narrow confines of this ship.

A great moral carnival was in the offing aboard the
Admiral Bragueton
. The "unclean beast" would not escape his fate. That was me.

This in itself made the trip worthwhile. Isolated among these spontaneous enemies, I labored to identify them without their noticing. Especially in the morning, I was able to watch them with impunity through the porthole of my cabin. Before breakfast, covered with hair from pubis to eyebrows and from their rectums to the soles of their feet, they would emerge to take the air in pajamas that were transparent in the sunlight; or glass in hand, sprawled against the rail, they would belch and retch, especially the captain with the bulging bloodshot eyes, whose liver started plaguing him at daybreak. Regularly at dawn he would ask his cronies about me, curious to know if I hadn't been "tossed overboard" yet, "like a gob of spit"! And he'd illustrate his remark by projecting a turgid oyster into the frothing sea. Boy oh boy!

The
Admiral
wasn't getting ahead very fast, just groaning along from roll to roll. It was more like a sickness than a voyage. As I examined the members of the morning council from my porthole, they all seemed rather seriously ill, malarial, alcoholic, syphilitic in all likelihood; at a distance of thirty feet, their visible decay was some consolation for my own troubles. These bigmouths, after all, were just as defeated as I was ... still bragging, nothing more! That was the only difference! ... The mosquitoes had worked them over, sucking their blood and pumping their veins full of poisons that would never go away ... Treponemas were filing away their arteries ... Alcohol was corroding their livers ... The sun was cracking their kidneys ... Crab lice were clinging to their pubic hair and eczema to the skin of their bellies ... The searing light would scorch their retinas! ... In not so long a time what would be left of them? A bit of brain ... To do what with, I ask you! ... where they were going? ... To commit suicide? Where they were going a brain wouldn't do them a bit of good ... No two ways ... it's no joke growing old in a place where there's nothing to do ... but look at yourself in a mirror with verdigris for silvering, and see yourself getting seedier and seedier, more and more decrepit ... Rot sets in quickly in the green mansions, especially when it's atrociously hot.

The North at least preserves your flesh; Northerners are pale once and for all. Between a dead Swede and a young man who has had a bad night there's not much to choose. But the day after a colonial lands, he's already full of maggots. Those infinitely laborious little worms have been waiting for him personally, and they'll stay with him a lot longer than life will. He's a bag of worms, that's all.

We had another week at sea before putting in to Bragamance, the first of the promised lands, I felt as if I were living in a case of dynamite. I had just about given up eating for fear of sitting down at their table or crossing the deck in the daytime. I'd stopped talking altogether. I was never seen taking the air. It would have been hard to be as little in evidence on that ship as I was and yet stay on board.

My cabin steward, a family man, was kind enough to inform me that those dashing colonial officers had lifted their glasses and sworn a solemn oath to slap my face at the first opportunity and then chuck me overboard. When I asked him why, he didn't know and asked me in turn what I had done to warrant so much hard feeling. We were left with our perplexity. It was unlikely to be cleared up. They didn't like my face, that's all. You won't catch me taking another trip with people so hard to please. In addition, they had so much time on their hands, sequestered with themselves for thirty whole days, that it didn't take much to stir them up. And besides, when you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Métro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children and a lot more. It happens all the time, and you get used to it. On a boat this same impatience is more noticeable, which makes it more upsetting.

In that bubbling cauldron, the suint of those scalded beings is concentrated, the presentiment of the vast colonial solitude that will soon bury them and their destinies and make them groan like the dying. They cling, they bite, they rend, they froth at the mouth. My importance on the ship increased prodigiously from day to day. My rare appearances at table, silent and stealthy as I tried to make them, took on the magnitude of significant events. The moment I entered the dining room, the hundred and twenty passengers gave a start and began to whisper ...

Advancing from malignant suppositions to slanderous conclusions, the colonial officers at the captain's table, fortified with
apéritif
after
apéritif
, the tax collectors, and especially the lady schoolteachers on their way back to the Congo (of these there was quite an assortment on board the
Admiral Bragueton
) puffed me up to infernal proportions. On boarding the ship in Marseille, I had been nothing, just a dreamy sort of nobody, but now, thanks to the concentrated attention of all those alcoholics and frustrated vaginas, I found myself changed beyond recognition, endowed with alarming prestige. The captain of the ship, a shady, breezy, racketeering type, had gone out of his way to shake hands with me at the start. When he crossed my path now, he didn't even seem to know me, it was as if I'd been wanted for some sordid crime, guilty from the start ... Guilty of what? When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

From what I seemed to discern of the compact malevolence that held me in its vise, the female section of the conspiracy was masterminded by one of the schoolteachers. She was going back to the Congo to die, or so at least I hoped, the bitch. Almost always she was trailing around after the officers, so handsome in their resplendent tight-fitting tunics and further embellished by the oath they had sworn to crush me like a noisome slug well before the next port of call. They wondered out loud whether I would be as repulsive flattened out as I was erect. In short, they were having a fine time. The schoolteacher whetted their fury, called down thunders on the deck of the
Admiral Bragueton
, resolved to know no rest until I had been picked up gasping, punished forever for my imaginary impertinence, chastised for daring to exist, brutally beaten, bruised and bleeding, imploring pity under the boot and fist of one of those heroes, whose muscular prowess and spectacular rage she was burning to admire. A scene of high carnage, from which her weary ovaries promised themselves an awakening. As good as being raped by a gorilla. Time was passing, and it's dangerous to keep the
afficionados
waiting too long. I was the bull. The whole ship was clamoring, quivering from port to starboard.

The sea enclosed us in that boiler-plated circus. Even the engine-room crew knew what was going on. And since we only had three days ahead of us before putting into port, three decisive days, several matadors volunteered. The more I avoided the showdown, the more aggressive, the more impending they became. The executioners began to rehearse. They cornered me between two cabins, at a bend in the corridor. I escaped by the skin of my teeth, but going to the toilet was getting downright dangerous. With only three days to go, I decided to forgo the needs of nature. The portholes were all I needed. Crushing hatred and boredom were all around me. It can't be denied, the boredom on ships is something unbelievable; to tell the truth, it's cosmic. It fills the sea, the ship, the heavens. It's enough to unhinge the soundest of minds, so what would you expect of those chimerical deadheads?