Tropic Moon (16 page)

There was a strong smell from all the blacks crowded together. Timar hadn't had anything to eat or drink. He was starting to feel dizzy, all the more so because he'd been on his feet the whole time and had to stand on tiptoe in order to get a real view.

“Good!” the judge suddenly declared, as the clock marked 10:45. “Silence!”

The black man didn't understand but fell silent instinctively.

“Tell us what he said!”

This was addressed to another black, in white pants and a black vest, wearing a plastic dress collar and glasses—the interpreter. His voice was deep and serious, like far-off thunder.

“He says that he has never laid eyes on Thomas, given that they do not come from the same village, and that he did not even know that Thomas existed.”

That sentence alone took three minutes to emerge from the translator's mouth. The judge shouted, “Louder!”

“He says it is because of the goats he demanded from his brother-in-law, after his wife ran off with a man from another village. She was his first wife, one of the chief's daughters, and she told everyone that …”

No one was paying any attention. Timar couldn't follow, anymore than the others could, the tenuous thread of a speech whose every other word escaped him. He looked at Adèle. He wondered who she'd spent the night with.

Was she still naked under her dress? Had a man seen her thighs slipping out slowly from under the black silk, her white thighs and supple stomach, her slightly liquid breasts?

“They didn't want to give him back the goats, and …”

Suddenly four blacks were all talking at the same time, in dialect, arguing with the accused, arguing among themselves. Their voices were sharp. The accused, wearing a loincloth, looked on in bewilderment.

If you stopped paying close attention for a few moments, the scene lost any semblance of reality; it was a crazy nightmare, a weird parody. On the table covered with the green cloth was a bottle of whiskey. The whites offered one another cigarettes and talked about something else.

Bouilloux was in attendance, along with three other loggers and the notary clerk. They were a distinct group, between the blacks and the officers of the court, standing next to a window and against the cord. Bouilloux was the first to shout, “Enough!”

Other whites took up the cry, “Enough!”

The judge shook a little bell, a cheap toy for a child, not what you'd expect in a court.

“We still need to hear from the woman Amami. Where is the woman Amami?”

Hands pushed her through the crowd of blacks to a place just short of the rope. She was an old black woman. Her breasts sagged. There were tattoos in heavy relief on her chest and stomach, and her head was shaved.

She stood where she'd been left, not saying anything, not seeing anything, and Timar was troubled by a vague impression. He saw the woman in profile, then in partial profile, and it brought back the girl he'd slept with in the village on the river. Weren't the features the same? The outline of the shoulders and hips? Could this woman be the other one's mother?

In which case, the accused, the small man who'd talked for so long without anyone listening—wouldn't he be the father?

Timar compared the couple to his glorious vision of the girl, her body that was both so slender and so full. They were a pitiful sight—more meagerly dressed than anyone. The old woman's skin looked ashen.

They stood a yard apart from each other. Timar saw them look at each other and realized that they had no idea where they were, or what they were doing, or why, most of all, they'd become the object of everyone's hatred. The husband especially, who had a flat upturned nose and beady red eyes, was casting fitful, almost crazed glances around the room.

No one paid attention. At the same moment, Timar became aware of Bouilloux giving him meaningful looks, even motioning with his head, as if to say, half in pleading and half in threat, “Keep your cool!”

Then the woman began to speak—in a monotone, as if each syllable were of equal weight. At the same time, she kept tying and untying her scanty loincloth. And to give herself confidence she trained her eyes on a precise point on the wall, right next to the clock, where there was the stain of a swatted fly.

Out one window Timar recognized the chief paddler; he smiled broadly at him. The heat grew ever more intense. The crowd of bodies, bodies of whites and bodies of blacks, seemed wrapped in an actual cloud, the bland sweat of the whites and the acrid sweat of the blacks mixed with the stench of pipes and cigarettes.

From time to time people made a quiet departure. They returned shortly, after running to the hotel to quench their thirst.

Timar was hot, thirsty, and hungry, but his nerves were so tightly strung that he was able to hold on. He kept trying to catch Adèle's eye, but she looked away. A white man he didn't know was whispering in her ear. She was pale, and there were circles under her eyes.

He was furious and yet full of pity for her; he couldn't sort out his contradictory emotions. For example, the idea that she'd spent the night with someone else made him want to kill her but also to take her tenderly in his arms, weeping over what fate had brought them to.

He heard the voice of the black woman. They were letting her talk on and on, perhaps out of laziness—in order to delay the moment of decision. He saw her shaved old woman's head, her sagging breasts. Her legs were spindly, her knees somewhat turned in.

She spoke without pause, stumbling over her words and swallowing her saliva, fiercely determined to make herself understood and believed. She didn't act like a white woman; she didn't try to engage their sympathy. She never raised her voice. And, instead of crying or fainting, she made it a point of honor to stand as stiff as a statue.

The only human thing about her was her tone of voice, like a bored priest's, those identical syllables that—if you didn't pay attention—became a murmur as indistinct as the sound of rain on a window.

The tension made Timar clench his fists. Her voice pained him, like one of those sad lullabies that country wet nurses still sang. There was something spellbinding about this terrible and nostalgic music, while not a muscle stirred in her face; he was more and more convinced that once again he was seeing that other face, the younger one's, turned toward him as the canoe was leaving the village, and then the motion of her arm, which she'd hardly dared to lift.

Other images crowded in, and he was surprised at how sharp they were. The dozen pairs of eyes fixed on him as the paddles rose and fell; their song—also like a lament—rising into the sultry air. And the hangdog look of the men the moment they struck the branch and Timar lost his temper.

His chest hurt. Was it from hunger or thirst? His knees shook from standing on tiptoe for so long. Suddenly he had an idea. It was his turn to shout, “Enough! Get it over with!”

At that moment, the judge happened to ring his ridiculous little bell. The woman didn't understand; she raised her voice to make herself heard over it. She didn't want to stop speaking. The interpreter spoke up and she raised her voice even louder, never moving, droning on in a tone of despair.

It was like the
Parce Domine
that they would sing three times in a row in church in times of disaster, to different notes, each time more loudly.

Now her voice rang out. She was talking faster. She wanted to tell everything—everything!

“Remove her!”

Other blacks, policemen, who had been carefully dressed by the whites in dark-blue uniforms topped off with Zouave caps, dragged the woman away through the crowd. Did she really know why they'd brought her here or why they were forcing her to leave? She didn't stop—she went on speechifying to herself.

Timar's glance met Adèle's, and he could tell that she was really starting to panic. He never guessed that it was because of his own appearance! His exhaustion and sickness, his struggles, the heat—everything, absolutely everything could be read in his ravaged, deathly pale face and feverish eyes—eyes that no longer settled on anything, but flitted back and forth from white to black, from the clock to the fly-specked wall.

He was covered in cold sweat. His breath came with difficulty, and he couldn't fix his thoughts anymore than his glance. But he had to think; it was urgent; it was absolutely necessary.

“Tell us what she said. Make it short! That was really something! Make it short!”

“She said it isn't true.”

The interpreter was sure of himself, flush with self-importance. Murmurs came from the windows and the judge tinkled his bell, shouting, “Silence! Or I'll clear the court!”

Other blacks took the witness stand of their own accord; the judge regained his composure and leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table.

“You, can you speak French?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What makes you think Amami killed Thomas?”

“Yes, sir!”

He pronounced it “suh.”

These were the two supporting witnesses. Timar understood everything. Even better—he could now reconstruct the events as they had happened one by one. While he was in the village, gazing at that good-looking naked girl, Adèle had gone to see the chief in his hut and offered him money in exchange for his producing a guilty party from among his people. She'd left the gun with him.

It was so simple. The chief had selected the person he liked the least, a black who'd married his daughter and then, when she left him, had the effrontery to demand his bride-price back. The bride-price was some goats and hoes. Five hoes! Five pieces of iron! Two other blacks also testified—men to whom promises had been given. They wanted to earn their pay.

“Yes, sir!”

“But that's not what I'm asking you. When did you come to believe that Amami had murdered Thomas?”

And the judge, exasperated, said, “Interpreter, translate the question.”

They went back and forth forever in the native tongue. Finally, they had to be interrupted; the interpreter, unperturbed, translated: “He says Amami has always been considered a bandit.”

It was so tense Timar wanted to scream. Amami had stayed after his wife was dragged away. He looked at his accusers in a daze; he tried to speak, but they wouldn't let him. He no longer understood. He was drowning.

Was it really his daughter that Timar had slept with? He blushed at the thought that she was a virgin and that he'd taken her anyway, roughly, with, for an instant, the feeling that he was taking his vengeance on all of Africa.

“So in fact this very gun was found in his hut?”

The judge displayed a pistol. Timar felt Adèle looking at him. So were Bouilloux, the one-eyed man, and the fat notary clerk.

Because he couldn't see himself, he didn't understand. He couldn't see why, in spite of the gravity of the moment, Bouilloux was shoving his way through the crowd of blacks to get to him.

He didn't realize that even the blacks around him were looking at him with apprehension and astonishment. His breath whistled feverishly. He squeezed his hands until his knuckles cracked.

“They both confirm that this is the gun they found. Everyone has sworn to the same. No other white has been to the village since the crime.”

The black with the flat, upturned nose directed an anguished, pleading look at the interpreter. He, too, resembled the girl; his skin was also gray and ashen.

The logger and the fat notary clerk watched Bouilloux wade through the crowd toward his goal. On the official side of the rope, the prosecutor and Adèle were talking in low voices and looking at Timar. Suddenly a hand seized Timar's arm; it was Bouilloux.

A voice said, “Careful, now.”

Careful of what? Of who? It was driving him mad. For a few seconds, Timar became one with the miserable, half-naked black struggling against the crowd, surrounded by, hunted by, overwhelmed by it.

They were hunting him down, too! They'd sent Bouilloux over to corner him! The logger's steely fingers dug into his arm.

Adèle was looking at him. The prosecutor was looking at him. Even the judge looked up nervously, sensing danger in the air, but all he did was take a sip of whiskey.

Was the black man having the same reaction, feeling the same terror at that moment? The sense that everything was turning against him, that he was being crushed, as if all these bodies, white and black, were circling in to smother him? He continued speaking in the midst of the uproar, talking to himself in a shrill voice, over and over repeating his story that no one wanted to hear.

Timar's nerves were totally shot, and in spite of Bouilloux's bone-crushing grip on his arm, in spite of Adèle and her stare, in spite of the prosecutor, who was smiling at him, Timar shouted, actually shouted, making himself as tall as possible, his face sweaty but drained of blood, his throat so tight that the words hurt him coming out: “It's not true! It's not true! He didn't kill him! It was …”

Who cared? It was time for it all to be over! It was time!

He sobbed, “It was her! And you know it!”

With a flip of the wrist, Bouilloux threw him to the ground, where he collapsed amid a throng of black legs and feet.

I
N A LOW
, sneering voice, he said, “It's obvious! It doesn't exist!”

Two passengers turned to look and he looked back unblinkingly. He even gave a shrug—they were government officials, nothing more. The packet boat, having pulled in its launches, was slowly leaving Libreville's outer harbor. Timar was seated at the bar just behind the first-class section. Suddenly he calmed down. He had just realized that he was looking for the last time at the yellow line of the beach, the darker line of vegetation, the red roofs, the jaunty palms.

He was gaunt and his face twitched. He wore a constant scowl. He clenched his fists and muttered under his breath even when there were people around.

“Who brought me to the station?”