Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? (4 page)

Had she bewitched him?

The rains had let up now for two weeks. The hedges of croton bordering the houses of the Europeans could finally lift their heads. The clumps of guinea grass sprouted green along the embankments. Behind the fences of secco the animals frolicked for joy. Only Koffi Ndizi's compound remained unaffected by this springlike revival. One night Tanella, a concubine of Mawourou, the king's uncle on his mother's side, had stuck a knife in his heart while he was asleep. Once the deed was done, she had fled.

Two years earlier Tanella had been one of the gifts, together with the fowl, dried fish, and richly woven wrappers, the village of Attonblan had offered Koffi Ndizi. She had never been much to his liking, and he had left her to Kwame Aniedo, who for a time had used her for his pleasure. One day, while she was pounding plantains in one of the courtyards, Mawourou had caught sight of her fifteen-year-old breasts. Mawourou had fathered a dozen sons, already fathers to sons themselves; but he was still so troubled by the desires of the flesh that he employed an army of fetish priests to concoct his aphrodisiacs. Tanella's crime was only discovered the next morning when the blood that had trickled out under the doors of Mawourou's hut coagulated into a red crust in the very middle of the courtyard. Murder was so rare an occurrence in the region that people first attributed the gaping hole in the old man's heart to a fit of anger by the spirits. Then the truth became obvious. The evil deed had been caused by a human hand. Some women who had got up early recalled having seen Tanella running away in blood-soaked clothes and remembered she had complained of Mawourou on many occasions. His breath was fetid. He had trouble getting a hard-on; he beat her. They searched for her throughout the compound, in the vicinity of the lagoon, and even as far as the forest. A few men ran along the road to the village of Attonblan but came back empty-handed. Nobody had seen Tanella. At day's end the rumor spread that she had found refuge at the Home for Half-Castes. So the widows, the children, and the friends of Mawourou, all those who had known him while he was alive and all those who had nothing better to do, assembled into a crowd and marched off to fetch her back from the Home.

The procession slowly wound its way through Adjame-Santey, where the population, struck with horror, commented on the terrible turn of events. Karamanlis watched from his store as he saw Hakim and his pupils bringing up the rear of the cortege. He eyed him scornfully. So there he was a “liberated” young man taking the side of a lascivious old man, abuser of young girls, who after all had only reaped what he sowed. On reaching the Palace of Justice (a fine name for a clay hut), the procession swelled with all the idle bystanders and onlookers who happened to be around. On the outskirts of Adjame-Santey the crowd quickened its pace without really knowing why, perhaps because night was approaching. The sky was growing dark. Soon the spirits would be on the prowl. In fact, much of the crowd did not really want Tanella to be put to death, the punishment for such a crime. They were marching with the others to demonstrate quite simply that it was time, high time, the French and their henchmen, governors, priests and oblates, left them to their customs and went home. Even the women who, deep in their hearts, were sympathetic toward Tanella, understandably tired of surrendering her youth night after night to the fantasies of an old man, were convinced that a shadowy past in its death throes was preferable to the future these foreigners had in store for them. When the crowd came in sight of the Home, they were surprised to find rows of militia from a neighboring camp pointing their guns at them. Why? The crowd hesitated and began to retreat in disorder. The fearful fled, predicting disaster. The more courageous began to throw rocks and stood their ground. With hackles up, the head of the militia barked a number of syllables that nobody could understand. He barked again. Then his men obeyed. And opened fire.

After the shots rang out, three bodies lay on the ground, including two of Hakim's pupils, the ten-year-olds Senanou and Dabla. Plus a dozen wounded.

 

Thomas de Brabant reread the official telegram he had just received.

On learning of the grave events at Adjame-Santey, the indiscriminate use of force, the high number of casualties, Governor Alix Pol-Roger was cutting short his mission to the north and returning home as quickly as possible. Having offered refuge to a murderer, the oblate Celanire Pinceau, who was the cause of the troubles, must appear before him immediately. The tone of the telegram left no doubt in his mind. Celanire's appointment as director of the Home would not be ratified. As for Thomas, he risked a reprimand or even a demotion. The hypocrisy of these senior colonial officials made him sick. Hundreds of “voluntary workers” were dying of hunger and ill treatment along the railroad. Nobody breathed a word about them, whereas the three wretched corpses of Adjame-Santey would be the talk of all French West Africa. In fact, the administration was mainly concerned about the two school pupils, Senanou and Dabla. As luck would have it, they were the sons of Betti Bouah, one of the richest merchants of the region, of royal blood, related to Koffi Ndizi, but who had the intelligence to be sympathetic to the French. It was now feared he would switch sides. A paltry excuse! What rules was Thomas expected to obey? Perhaps they would have preferred he let the fanatics sack the Home, stone Tanella to death, and beat Celanire and her assistants black and blue. That sort of tragedy was exactly what his firmness had avoided that evening, and law and order had been restored. Celanire had no intention of shielding Tanella from justice. She only meant to protect her from her compatriots. After having kept her overnight at the Home and calmed her down as best she could, she herself had handed her over to the
askaris
who had taken her to the jail at Grand-Bassam. From there she was to leave on the first ship for Dakar and appear before the supreme court that met twice a year. Thomas's legitimate anger at his superiors was mingled with an insidious terror of their discovering something else, too shameful to mention. He no longer understood what madness had let him be convinced by Celanire and made him approve of her plans. It was as if his mistress had bewitched him. At her side, he was powerless and could no longer distinguish right from wrong. It
was a fact they only entertained high-ranking officials at the Home. No subalterns, secretaries, or pencil pushers! Even so, they were at the mercy of a tongue loosened by too much drink.

Incapable of staying still, he donned his pith helmet and mounted his bicycle, since the track was now passable again. He wisely made a detour to avoid the house where the wake for Senanou and Dabla was being held. The place had become a rallying point for fanatics making anti-French remarks where, he had been told, Hakim was in his element.

At the end of the year, Adjame-Santey was to be renamed Bingerville at an official ceremony in honor of the colony's first governor. The administrative buildings, however, were far from finished. The governor's palace had scarcely poked its head out from the building site that had once been the cemetery. As Thomas rode around the mission, he saw a cortege approaching. Flanked by the remainder of his guards, sheltering under an umbrella, preceded by his gold-cane bearer, King Koffi Ndizi, tripping on his sandals, was going to pay his final respects to his cousin's children. The procession took up the entire width of the path, for Koffi Ndizi was surrounded by a good dozen sycophants, including the inevitable Hakim. In a flash, Thomas summed up the situation. Either he kept pedaling straight ahead and rode right into the oncoming procession, knocking over two or three, or else he got off his bicycle and stood like a country yokel in the guinea grass on the embankment. Despite his arrogance, he did not think twice. Adjame-Santey had been through enough confrontations in such a short time. He dismounted. The king walked by without turning his head in his direction, joining both hands level with his mouth in an African greeting, while the looks of his entourage cut him like flint stones. He even thought he heard snickers of laughter.

At present the Home was looking so good it would have been the pride of Dakar. Under the late Desrussie, an epidemic of yaws would follow an epidemic of yellow fever. It was better not to count the number of dead. Once they had buried thirty in a single month. Under Celanire's radiating care the children glowed with health and cleanliness. A group of small children under the charge of two assistants was sitting in a circle on the lawn singing “Frère Jacques” in their delightful little voices. Some of the older boys were marching off in manly fashion to the fields, hoe in hand. The bamboo grove, the young palm trees, and the budding orchard were another treat for the eyes. Celanire had taken advantage of the dry season to have the facade repainted in a very pale eggshell tint edged with dark red. Her choice of unusual colors was evidence of her exquisite taste, which made her so precious to Thomas. It was obvious the meager allowance attributed to running the Home couldn't possibly have been enough to cover all these improvements, and going over the colony's accounts with a fine-toothed comb would have turned up quite a few surprises.

Celanire was resting in a boudoir, draped in a kimono of black silk, a color she seemed to like, embroidered with red roses and buttercups. If it hadn't been for her wide, somewhat triangular nose and her very full lips, she could have been mistaken for an Indian from the French trading posts of Pondicherry, Kana Kal, and Manahe. Thomas smothered her with kisses, then got control of himself and pulled the telegram out of his pocket. Celanire shrugged her shoulders and vaguely asked a few questions. Where exactly was Governor Pol-Roger? Thomas explained he was in Felkessekaha among the Niarafolo Senufo natives. As if this was of no interest to her, she changed the subject. She was thinking of going to the wake for Senanou and Dabla as a way of expressing her condolences to the family. What did he think of the idea? Thomas uttered a shrill cry: Was she out of her mind? The Africans hated her. She would be stoned to death.

In fact hostilities had been declared for some time now between Celanire and the Africans. Celanire had proclaimed loud and clear she had no intention of letting the girls in her care be sexually mutilated. Going by what she said, the very fact that the mothers let their offspring be placed in the Home for Half-Castes by their French papas meant they renounced de facto all their rights, and the children became the sole responsibility of the French administration. Obviously, such quibbling had not made the slightest impression. While the innocent six-year-old Marie-Angélique was spending the weekend with her family, they had grabbed the opportunity to put her under the excision knife. She had almost died from a hemorrhage. In a fit of anger, Celanire forbade her boarders to leave the Home from that moment on and only allowed family visits once every three months. Although some families were not bothered by these rules, others, as you can imagine, raised a hue and cry. Half-caste or not, some mothers were fond of their little darlings and accused Celanire of sequestering them. They camped outside the Home in tears. The courts were bombarded with complaints, and Thomas had great trouble getting the fact accepted that his mistress was within her rights.

Thomas had already noticed that Celanire was a stubborn woman who did just what she liked. Without paying the slightest heed to his objections, she drew him close to her.

Making love to Celanire was a delight Thomas could never have imagined even in his wildest dreams. Deep down he called her “my little panther” because he never knew whether her embrace would make him moan with pain or pleasure. When his strength gave out, she asked for more. At the very end she left him exhausted, worn out, deliciously dead.

 

Betti Bouah's house made the Africans proud and left the Europeans stunned. It had been built by Appolonian workers from Cape Coast in the Gold Coast and comprised an upper floor that was reached by a dual staircase mounted with open fretwork wooden balustrades. The living room where the children's bodies lay was richly furnished in the European style with rugs, sofas, and armchairs. Low tables were covered in crocheted doilies. There were no less than five clocks and four music boxes fixed to the wall, plus portraits of Napoleon at Arcole, Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor, Treich-Laplène, Binger, Queen Victoria, and gilt-framed round mirrors surmounted by an imperial spread eagle. The showpiece was a sideboard with a display of blue-stemmed crystal glasses. Like all rich merchants, Betti Bouah had collected every gift he had received from his European customers in the same room. Owing to his status in society, people had come from the surrounding villages and even as far away as the Alladian shores, draped in their mourning robes. According to custom, the assembly was divided strictly in two. Inside the house, the women, mothers, stepmothers, and aunts of the little victims. Outside on the verandas, the men. The latter were frantically interrogating Hakim on how to rid themselves of the French. But contrary to what Thomas had been told, Hakim had absolutely nothing to offer and stammered out a series of platitudes. So the more the evening dragged on, the angrier they felt in their helplessness and the faster the calabashes of palm wine were passed around. The fact that Tanella had been handed over to the French authorities did not calm them down. The French had no business meddling in this affair. It was a matter for the native courts. Betti Bouah had consulted with his lawyer in Bordeaux, who advised him to lodge a complaint with the governor-general of French West Africa. And he had got nowhere with Koffi Ndizi, who did not understand a thing about “white men's business,” as he liked to say.

When around ten o'clock in the evening Celanire made her entrance, the buzz of conversation abruptly stopped. Those who had a cutlass handy thought of using it. But she had such a gentle look about her, they had second thoughts. She avoided making any sign of the cross or genuflection that might shock these heathens and remained standing, head lowered, in front of the children's bodies. Then, using the widow Desrussie as interpreter, she asked to go and join the women. To do so she had to walk past Koffi Ndizi, spilling out of his armchair, and she nodded her head in respect while the king, seeing her for the first time, stared, openmouthed. Hakim was the only one who believed Celanire had come to thumb her nose at them and see how good she was at getting them to change their minds. For those who had quickly badmouthed her behind her back now retracted and spoke highly of her beauty. Koffi Ndizi even declared that the fetish priests had been wrong and such a lovely individual could never be the “horse” of the
aawabo,
the evil spirits. Some daydreamed out loud and wondered whether she would agree to marry an African. After all, she was as black as they were! However hard a group of elders recalled that a woman's beauty is a man's misfortune, nobody paid attention to these sayings of another age. When Celanire emerged from the women's quarters, Koffi Ndizi ordered Hakim to accompany her home, seeing how late it was.