Journey to the End of the Night (18 page)

The colonies make these little clerks fat or make them thin; either way they hold them fast; there are only two ways to die under the sun, the fat way and the thin way. There's no other. You may have a preference, but it's your constitution that decides whether you get fat or whether the bones jab at your skin.

The Director up there on the red cliff, cavorting diabolically with his Negress under the tin roof with the ten thousand kilos of sunshine on it would be no better off when his time was up. He was the skinny kind. Sure, he was putting up a fight. It looked as if he could beat the climate. Looked! In reality he was crumbling even faster than the others. The story was that he'd thought up a beautiful scheme that would make him a fortune in two years ... But he'd never have time to carry it out, even if he applied himself to defrauding the company day and night. Twenty-two directors before him had tried to make a fortune, each with his own system, like at roulette. All this was well known to the stockholders, who were keeping an eye on him from up above, still higher up, from the Rue Moncey in Paris. The Director made them laugh. How childish! The stockholders were the biggest bandits of all, they knew their Director was syphilitic and much too horny for the tropics, they knew he downed enough quinine and bismuth to burst his eardrums and enough arsenic to make his gums drop out.

In the Company's bookkeeping the Director's months were numbered, numbered like the months of a pig's life.

My little colleagues never exchanged ideas. Only set formulas, baked and rebaked like dry crusts of thought. "Worry won't get us anywhere!" they said. "Never say die! ..." "The Director's a jerk! ..." "Nigger skin is good for tanning!" etc. In the evening after work we'd meet for
apéritifs
with an "assistant manager," a Monsieur Tandernot from La Rochelle. If Tandernot hobnobbed with the traders, it was only because they'd pay for his drinks. He was a pitiful case, stone broke. His position in the colonial hierarchy was the lowest possible, overseeing road construction in the middle of the jungle. His militiamen had clubs, and naturally the natives worked. But since no white man ever used the new roads that Tandernot built, and since the blacks preferred their own tracks through the jungle where it was harder to lay hands on them for tax purposes, and since Tandernot's government roads didn't actually go anywhere, they soon vanished under a dense growth of vegetation, from month to month if the truth be known.

"Believe it or not," that astonishing pioneer would say, "last year I lost a hundred and twenty-two kilometers of them."

During my stay, I only heard Tandernot boast about one thing, the one achievement he was humbly vain about: he was the only European capable of catching cold in Bragamance with the thermometer at a hundred and ten in the shade ... That one distinction consoled him for many sorrows. "I've caught another rotten cold!" he'd announce proudly over his
apéritif
.

"You don't see that happening to anyone else!" And other members of our sickly group would cry out: "Good old Tandernot! What a man!" This little satisfaction was better than nothing. Where vanity is at stake, anything is better than nothing.

Another way the Company's petty clerks amused themselves was putting on fever contests. It wasn't difficult. These matches could go on for days, and they whiled away the time. When evening came and, almost always, the fever with it, they'd take their temperatures.

"Hey, I've got a hundred and one!" ... "Hell, that's nothing. I can work up a hundred and three any time I feel like it!"

These readings were absolutely accurate and above board. By the light of hurricane lamps they'd compare thermometers. The winner would tremble and gloat. "I'm sweating so much I can't piss," said the most emaciated of the lot, a skinny young fellow from the Pyrenees, a champion of febrility who had come to Bragamance, so he told me, to get away from a seminary where he hadn't enough freedom. But time was passing, and none of my companions could tell me exactly what species of freak the man I was replacing in Bikomimbo belonged to.

"He's funny!" they told me, and that was all.

"When you start out in a job like that," said the little Pyrenean with the high fever, "you've got to show what you're good for! It's all one way or the other. As far as the Director's concerned, you'll either be solid gold or solid shit! And another thing. He'll judge you right away."

I was very much afraid of being put down as "solid shit" or worse. These young slave drivers, my friends, took me to see another employee of the Pordurière, who deserves special mention. He operated a store in the European quarter. Moldering with fatigue, oily and decrepit, he dreaded the slightest ray of light because of his eyes, which two years of uninterrupted baking under a tin roof, had dried out atrociously. It took him a good half hour every morning to open them, so he told me, and another half hour before he could see more or less clearly. Every ray of light was torture. A big mangy mole. Suffocation and suffering had become second nature with him, and so had thieving. If he'd suddenly woken up healthy and honest, it would really have thrown him off balance. Even today, at this distance, I'd call his hatred for the Director General one of the most violent passions it has ever been given me to observe. At the thought of the Director, a violent rage would make him forget the pain he was in, and on the slightest pretext he'd rant and rave, all the while scratching himself from top to toe.

He never stopped scratching, in ellipses so to speak, from the lower end of his spinal column to the top of his neck. He dug furrows into his epidermis and dermis with his bloody fingernails, while continuing to wait on his numerous customers, most of them virtually naked blacks.

With his free hand he would plunge busily into various repositories to the right and left of him in the dark shop. Without ever making a mistake, deft and admirably quick, he would take out exactly what the customer wanted, stinking leaf tobacco, damp matches, cans of sardines, a ladleful of molasses, super-alcoholic beer in phony bottles, which he'd suddenly drop if overcome by the desire to scratch in the cavernous depths of his trousers. Then he would thrust in his whole arm, and it would emerge through the fly, which he always left partly open as a precaution.

He referred to the ailment that was eating away his skin by its local name, "corocoro."

"This miserable corocoro! When I think that the stinking Director hasn't caught it yet, it makes me itch a hundred times worse! The corocoro can't get a hold on him! ... He's too rotten already. That pimp isn't a man. He's a smell! ... Pure unadulterated shit!" When he said that, we'd all burst out laughing, the black customers too, in emulation. He frightened us a little. But he had one friend, a wheezing, graying little fellow who drove a truck for the Pordurière. He used to bring us ice that he'd stolen here and there from ships tied up at the wharf.

We'd drink his health at the bar, surrounded by the black customers, who looked on enviously. These customers were the more sophisticated blacks, who'd lost their fear of doing business with white men, a kind of elite so to speak. The other blacks, not so smart, preferred to keep their distance. Matter of instinct. But the most enterprising, the most contaminated of the blacks got taken on as clerks in the store. You could recognize the black clerks by the way they cursed and yelled at other blacks. My colleague with the corocoro traded in crude rubber, it came in sticky balls that the natives would bring in from the bush in big sacks.

While we were in the store, listening to him by the hour, a family of rubber gatherers came to the door and froze with timidity, the father in the lead, wrinkled, girt in a skimpy orange loincloth and holding his long machete.

The savage was afraid to come in despite the encouragements of one of the native clerks:

"C'mon in, nigger! Come look see! We no eat savages!" Won over by these kind words, they stepped into the sweltering shack, at the back of which our corocoro man was ranting. Apparently that native had never seen a store or possibly even a white man before. One of the women, with a big basket of crude rubber balanced on her head, followed him with downcast eyes.

Quickly the recruiting clerks grabbed her basket and put the contents on the scales. The savage didn't know what the scales were about or anything else. His wife was still afraid to raise her head. The rest of the family waited outside. The clerk told them to come in, too bad if they missed the show.

That was the first time they had all trekked in from the bush to the white man's town. It must have taken them a good long time to collect all that rubber. So naturally they were interested in the outcome. You hang little cups on the trunks of the trees, and the rubber oozes into them very very slowly. Sometimes you don't get so much as a small glassful in two months.

After the weighing, our scratcher dragged the bewildered native behind the counter, did a little reckoning with a pencil stub, and shoved a few coins into the man's hand. Then he said: "Beat it! That's it!"

All his little white friends were convulsed to see how cleverly he had handled the transaction. The black man stood there by the counter, looking lost in his skimpy orange underdrawers.

One of the black clerks yelled at him to wake him up: "You no savvy money? You savage?" This clerk knew his onions, he was used to these peremptory transactions, he had probably been trained. "You no speakie French?" he went on. "You missing link, eh? ... What you speakum anyway? Couscous? Mabillia? Jackass! Bushman! You heap big jackass!"

The savage just stood there with his hand closed on his coins. He would have run away if he had dared, but he didn't dare.

"What you buy with dough?" the scratcher put in. "I haven't seen such a jughead in a long time! He must have come a long way,?What you wait for? Gimme that dough!" He grabbed the money, and in place of the coins gave the black man a bright green handkerchief that he had deftly spirited from some secret hiding place under the counter. When the black man hesitated to leave with the handkerchief, the scratcher went a step further. He certainly knew all the tricks of the conqueror's trade. Shaking the big square of muslin before the eyes of a wee black child, he said: "Ain't it pretty, you little turd? Did you ever see one like it, little sweetie, little stinkpot, little fart?" And one-two-three he tied it around the child's neck. Now the child was dressed.

The whole family stared at the child, decked out in the green cotton object ... There was nothing more they could do, because the handkerchief had come into the family. They could only accept it, take it, and go.

They all backed slowly out. They crossed the threshold. When the father, who was last, turned around to say something, the sharpest of the clerks, who was wearing shoes, helped him leave with a swift kick in the ass.

The entire little tribe stood silently on the other side of the Avenue Faidherbe, under the magnolia tree, watching us finish our
apéritifs
. It looked as if they were trying to understand what had happened to them.

The corocoro man was treating us. He even played his phonograph for us. You could find anything in his store. It made me think of the supply depots in the war. As I've told you, there were lots of blacks and small whites like myself working in the warehouses and plantations of the Compagnie Porduriere du Petit Togo at the same time as me. The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.

Wielding a club is fatiguing in the long run. The white men's hearts and minds, on the other hand, have been crammed full of the hope of becoming rich and powerful, and that costs nothing, absolutely nothing. We've heard enough about Egypt and the Tatar tyrants! In the art of squeezing the last ounce of labor out of a two-legged animal, those primitive ancients were pretentious incompetents! Did they ever think of calling their slave "Monsieur" or letting him vote now and then, or giving him his newspaper? And especially had they thought of sending him to war to work off his passions? After twenty centuries of Christianity (as I personally can bear witness) your modern man simply can't control himself when a regiment passes before his eyes. It puts too many ideas into his head. Accordingly, I decided to keep a close watch on myself from then on and learn to keep my mouth scrupulously shut, to conceal my longing to get away, in short, to prosper if possible and come what may, in the service of the Compagnie Porduriere. Not a moment to lose. Alongside our warehouses, on the muddy river banks, whole nests of crocodiles, insidious and unmoving, lurked in wait. Built of metal, they enjoyed the delirious heat, and so apparently did the blacks.

At midday you couldn't help wondering if all this bustle of toiling masses, this hubbub of screeching, overexcited blacks on the docks was possible.

To learn the secret of numbering sacks before taking to the bush, I had to submit to gradual asphyxiation in the Company's main warehouse along with the other clerks, between two scales wedged into the alkaline crowd of ragged, pustulous, singing black men. Each one of them drew a little cloud behind him and shook it in cadence. The dull thuds of the overseers' clubs descended on their magnificent backs without provoking the least complaint or protest. Dazed and passive, they suffered pain as unquestioningly as the torrid air of that dusty furnace.

The Director came by from time to time, always aggressive, to make sure I was mastering the techniques of numbering sacks and falsifying weights.

With sweeping blows of his club he cleared his path to the scales through the press of natives. "Bardamu," he said to me one morning when he was in high spirits. "You see these niggers all around us? ... Well, when I came to Little Togo almost thirty years ago, those loafers still lived by hunting, fishing, and intertribal massacres! ... I was a small trader then ... Well, as true as I'm standing here, I'd seen them coming home to their village after a victory, loaded with more than a hundred baskets of bleeding human flesh to stuff their bellies with! ... Hear that, Bardamu? ... Bleeding! ... Their enemies! A feast! ... Today, no more victories! We've accomplished that much! ... No more tribes! ... No more flimflam and foolishness! Today we've got a labor force and peanuts! Good hard work! No more hunting! No more guns! Peanuts and rubber! ... To pay taxes with! Taxes to get us more rubber and peanuts! This is life, Bardamu! Peanuts! Peanuts and rubber! ... And say ... Well, I'll be damned. There's General Tombat!"[48]