Journey to the End of the Night (21 page)

The same day we witnessed another two memorable thrashings pursuant to further disconcerting reports of dowries taken back, poisonings threatened ... promises unfulfilled ... children of uncertain origin, etc.

"Oh!" Grappa cried. "If they only knew how completely cold their bickerings leave me, they'd stay in their jungle where they belong instead of chewing my ear off with their cock and bull stories! Do I bother them with my troubles?" But then he started on a different idea: "You know, I'm almost beginning to think those apes are developing a taste for my justice ... For two years I've been trying to get them disgusted with it, but every Thursday they come back for more ... Believe it or not, young man, it's almost always the same ones who keep coming! ... A bunch of perverts if you ask me!"

Then the conversation turned to Toulouse, where he spent all his leaves and where he was planning to settle in six years when he retired. It was all right with me. We had pleasantly arrived at the Calvados stage when we were disturbed again by a native who'd been sentenced the week before but was late in having his sentence carried out. Now, two hours after everyone else, he'd come of his own free will to get his thrashing. He'd been on the trail for two days and two nights, and he had no intention of going back to his village with his business undone. But he was late, and in matters of penal punctuality Grappa was uncompromising: "He asked for it! Why didn't he wait his turn last time? ... I sentenced the motherfucker to those fifty strokes last Thursday, not today!"

Still, the client protested, for he had a good excuse; he'd had to hurry back to his village to bury his mother. He had three or four mothers all to himself. Excellent arguments! ...

"It will have to wait till the next session!"

But our client would barely have time for the trip to his village and back before the following Thursday. He went on protesting, he wouldn't budge. It took several violent kicks in the ass to get that masochist out of the camp. They gave him some pleasure, but not enough ... In the end he went to Alcide, who took advantage of the situation to sell him a whole assortment of tobacco, in the leaf, in packages, and in the form of snuff. Well entertained by these various incidents, I took my leave of Grappa. It was time for his siesta, and he withdrew to the interior of his hut, where his native housekeeper, who had just come back from her village, was already reclining. That black woman had a magnificent pair of tits, and she had been well schooled by the Sisters in Gabon. Not only did the young lady speak French (with a lisp), she also knew how to administer quinine in jam and to dig chiggers out of the soles of one's feet. She knew a hundred ways of making herself agreeable to a white man without tiring him or by tiring him, whichever he preferred.

Alcide was waiting for me. He was rather miffed. It was probably the invitation with which Grappa had honored me that decided him to confide in me. What he told me was pretty strong stuff. Unasked, he modeled Grappa's portrait in steaming cow flop. I replied that he had taken the words out of my mouth. Alcide's vulnerable point was that in defiance of army regulations, which strictly forbade it, he was trading with the natives in the jungle round about and with his twelve militiamen as well. He mercilessly sold those people tobacco on credit. When payday came around, there was no pay for the militiamen to collect, they had smoked it all up. They smoked up advances. This petty irregularity, what with the rarity of cash in the region, hampered the collection of taxes. Lieutenant Grappa was too cautious a man to provoke a scandal in Topo while he was in command, but he was definitely pissed off, maybe he was jealous. Understandably enough, he felt that whatever negligible sums of money the natives called their own should remain available to the tax collector. Each man to his taste and humble ambitions. At first this system of credit against their pay had seemed rather strange and even outrageous to the riflemen, whose sole purpose in working was to smoke Alcide's tobacco, but he had got them used to it by kicking them in the ass. By that time, they'd given up trying to collect their pay, they calmly smoked it up in advance, among the bright-colored flowers outside Alcide's hut, between two stints of imaginary drill. In short, there was room in Topo, small as it was, for two systems of civilization, Grappa's, which you might call Roman and which consisted of flogging your subjects for the sole purpose of extracting tribute, of which, if Alcide was to be believed, Grappa retained a disgraceful percentage for his own strictly personal use, and the more elaborate Alcide system bearing witness to a higher stage of civilization, in which every soldier becomes a customer. This military-commercial complex is much more modern and hypocritical; it is, indeed, the basis of our own system.

Lieutenant Grappa was no great shakes at geography. For his knowledge of the vast territories committed to his charge, he relied on a few rudimentary maps that he had at the post. He was none too eager to know more about those territories. After all, we know what trees and the jungle are, we can see them very nicely from a distance. Tucked away in the fronds and hollows of that immense steam bath, a few thinly disseminated tribes stagnated amid their fleas and flies, stultified by their totems and unflaggingly gorging themselves with putrid manioc ... Utterly na'ive, frankly cannibalistic, maddened by poverty, and ravaged by a thousand plagues. No earthly reason to go near them. Nothing to justify troublesome administrative incursions, which could yield no results whatsoever. When Grappa had finished meting out justice, he preferred to turn toward the sea and contemplate the horizon from which he had come one day and across which he would sail one day if all went well.

Familiar and all in all agreeable as the place had become to me, the time came when I had to think of leaving Topo for the post that was to be my dwelling place and occupation after several days of fluvial navigation and sylvan peregrinations.

Alcide and I were getting on fine together. We tried to fish for swordfish, a variety of shark that infested the waters in front of our hut. He was just as clumsy as I was. We never caught anything.

The only furnishings in his hut were his folding bed, mine, and a few crates, some empty, some full. I had the impression that what with his little business he must be putting quite a lot of money aside.

"Where do you keep it?" I asked him several times. "Where do you hide your filthy lucre?" Just to get his goat. "Planning a big spree when you get back?" I was only teasing him. Twenty times at least, as we dug into the inevitable canned tomatoes, I'd entertain him with amazing episodes of the heroic joyride from cathouse to cathouse that would celebrate his return to Bordeaux. He never said anything. He'd only laugh, as though my little stories amused him.

Apart from the drill and the court sessions, nothing happened in Topo, nothing whatever, so naturally, for want of other subjects, I'd take up the same old joke as often as possible. Once toward the end of my stay, I thought of writing to Monsieur Puta to touch him for some money. Alcide promised to mail my letter the next time the
Papaoutah
called. Alcide kept his writing materials in a small biscuit tin, just like the one Branledore had had, exactly the same. All re-enlisted sergeants seemed to have them. When he saw me start opening the box, Alcide made a movement to stop me. I was surprised and embarrassed. I had no idea why he wouldn't let me open it, but I put it down on the table. "Oh, all right, open it!" he said finally. "Hell, it doesn't matter." The photograph of a little girl was pasted to the inside of the lid. Just the head, a sweet little face with long curls, the way they wore them in those days. I took out pen and paper and quickly closed the lid. I was embarrassed at my indiscretion, but I also wondered why it had upset him so.

First I figured that the child must be his and he hadn't wanted to talk about her. I asked no questions, but then I heard him behind my back, trying to tell me something in a strange bumbling voice I'd never heard. I felt very uncomfortable. I knew I ought to help him tell me his story, but I didn't know how to go about it. I knew it would be a painful story to listen to, and I wasn't looking forward to it.

"It's nothing!" I finally heard him say. "It's my brother's daughter ... They're both dead ..." "Her parents?" "Yes, her parents ..."

"Then who's bringing her up? Your mother?" I asked him that to show I was taking an interest. "My mother's dead too." "Who then?" "Well, me!" He grinned and blushed crimson, as if he'd done something absolutely indecent. Then he hastened to rectify:

"All right, I'll explain ... I'm having her brought up in Bordeaux by the Sisters ... But don't get me wrong, they're no Sisters of Charity ... High-class Sisters ... She's my responsibility and you needn't worry. She'll want for nothing! Her name is Ginette ... Sweet little girl ... Like her mother ... She writes to me, she's making good progress, but you know, those schools are expensive ... Especially now that she's ten ... I want her to have piano lessons at the same time ... What do you think of the piano? ... Well, in my opinion the piano is the right thing for girls ... Don't you agree? ... And what about English? English can come in handy ... Do you know English?"

As Alcide confessed his failing?not being generous enough? I began to look at him more closely, with his little cosmetic mustache, his eccentric eyebrows, and his burnt-black skin. The delicacy of the man! And how he must have scrimped and saved on his meager wages ... his pitiful allowances and tiny clandestine business ... for months and years in this infernal Topo! ... I didn't know what to say, I had no experience, but his heart was so much superior to mine that I went red in the face ... Next to Alcide I was an impotent slob, boorish and vain ... No two ways ... Plain as day ...

I didn't dare speak to him anymore. Suddenly I felt unworthy to say a word to him. I, who only yesterday had kept him at a distance and even looked down on him a little.

"I haven't been lucky," he went on, unaware that he was embarrassing me with his confidences. "Imagine, two years ago she had infantile paralysis ... You know what infantile paralysis is?"

He went on to explain that the child's left leg was atrophied and that a specialist in Bordeaux was treating her with electricity.

"You think she'll get it back?" he asked me.

I assured him that she would recover completely with time and electricity. He spoke very circumspectly of his dead mother and of the child's infirmity. He was afraid, even at a distance, of harming her.

"Have you been to see her since her illness?"

"No, I've been here the whole time."

"Will you go and see her soon?"

"I don't think I'll be able to go for another three years ... You see, I do a little business here ... That's a big help to her ... If I went on leave now, my place here would be taken before I got back ... Especially with that bastard ..."

So Alcide had asked to do a double hitch, to stay in Topo for six consecutive years instead of three, for the sake of his little niece, of whom he had nothing but a few letters and that little photograph.

"What bothers me," he said after we'd gone to bed, "is that she hasn't anybody for the holidays ... That's hard on a little girl ..."

Obviously Alcide was perfectly at ease, at home so to speak, in the higher regions, on terms of familiarity with the angels. You wouldn't have known it to look at him. With hardly a thought of what he was doing, he had consented to years of torture, to the crushing of his life in this torrid monotony for the sake of a little girl to whom he was vaguely related. Motivated by nothing but his good heart, he had set no conditions and asked nothing in return. To that little girl far away he was giving enough tenderness to make the whole world over, and he never showed it.

Suddenly he fell asleep in the candlelight. After a while I got up to look at his face. He slept like everybody else. He looked quite ordinary. There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad.

There are two ways of getting into the jungle. One is to cut a tunnel through it, the way rats do in a bale of hay. That's the stifling way. I jibbed at that. Or you can endure the misery of sitting huddled in a hollow tree trunk, while they paddle you up the winding river from copse to snag, waiting for the endless days to pass and laying yourself open without defense to the deadly glare. And finally, dazed by the yapping of the black men, you reach your destination in some sort of condition.

At first your paddlers always need time to catch the cadence. Arguments. A paddle strikes the water, two or three rhythmic howls, the jungle sends back an answer, eddies, she's gliding, two paddles, three, still groping for the rhythm, waves, inarticulate burblings, a backward glance at the sea, flattening out as it recedes, and up ahead the long smooth expanse into which you're toiling. And for a while yet, far away on his dock, almost swallowed up by the sea mists, Alcide under his enormous bell-shaped pith helmet, a chunk of head, the face a small cheese, and below it the rest of him, floating in his tunic, lost in a strange white-trousered memory.

That's all I have left of the place, of Topo.

Have they managed to defend that scorching hamlet against the insidious scythe of the yellowish-brown river? Are its flea-bitten huts still standing? Are new Grappas and unknown Alcides still training new recruits in imaginary combat? Is the same plain-dealing brand of justice still being meted out? Is the drinking water still so rancid? So tepid? So bad that whenever you try to drink it, it leaves you disgusted for days on end ... Is there still no refrigeration? And what of those acoustic battles between the flies and the everlasting hum of the quinine ... Sulphate? Chloride? ... in your ears? ... But most of all: Are there still black people sweltering and pustulating in that caldron? Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe none of all that is there anymore, maybe a tornado broke loose one night, maybe the Little Congo, just in passing, gave Topo one good lick with its muddy tongue and it was all over. Maybe the whole place is dead and gone, the very name wiped off the maps, and nobody left to remember Alcide ... Maybe his little niece has forgotten him too. Maybe Lieutenant Grappa never saw his Toulouse again ... Maybe the jungle, which has always, year after year when the rainy season sets in, had designs on the dune, has recaptured the whole settlement, crushed it beneath the shade of its giant mahogany trees, even those unexpected little sand flowers that Alcide didn't want me to water ... Maybe it's all gone ...